Page 69 of Slapshot Bride

I don't comment on this. I walk, and I simply entertain her questions and curiosity.

When she does finally raise it, it's at a rock formation about a quarter mile in, the kind of layered sandstone that catches the morning light in horizontal bands of orange and amber. She lifts the camera, looks through the viewfinder, and goes very still.

I stop walking.

She adjusts. Moves two steps left. Crouches slightly. The shutter clicks.

She straightens, and her face is different. Just slightly. Like something that had been faintly braced went loose.

“Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. Then she's moving again, off the main trail toward the formation, and I follow at a distance because it's obvious she has forgotten I exist.

This is the part I was waiting to see and did not know I was waiting to see.

She goes quiet, moving through the landscape with the camera up and then down, stepping around things, crouching, tilting, trying angles that don't work and not being bothered by it.

Shutter click. Advance. Shutter click. She pushes her hair out of her face without looking away from the viewfinder.

I sit down on a flat rock and watch her work, and I think about what it takes to make a person put down a thing that lights them up like this.

What six years of small, careful, deniable erosion actually looks like from the inside. Whether she knows, standing on that dry golden hillside with a fifty-dollar camera and her hair in her eyes, how visible it is that she's returning to herself. Whether she can feel it.

I think she can.

She turns around at one point to check I'm still there and catches me looking. She smiles, and continues. A minute later, her eyes are back to me.

I look away, at the city spread in the valley below us, as if I have been looking at that the whole time, trying not to distract her.

“You’re staring,” she calls.

“I’m looking at the view.”

“The view is behind you.”

I don’t answer that.

She laughs, and the sound is soft like a melody.

My heart shifts, and I know it.

I'm completely gone for this woman. Three weeks. I have known her for three weeks.

That’s not long enough to justify the warmth that spreads through me when she laughs. Or the way I instantly want to take her pain and worries away when she’s distressed or in tears.

And watching her in her own world, with the camera, lighting up, and enjoying what she’s doing? I don’t know if my heart will be able to recover from this one.

I want to keep her forever. Capture that smile and keep it on her face everyday.

Not until she knows the truth about Maya.

A sour taste instantly materializes on my tongue. My chest tightens.

Maya. She’s going to cost me all of this when it comes out.

I’ll lose it all. This version of her, lit up and moving through the hills like she owns them. This thing between us that has no name yet but is moving in a direction I'm not going to be able to walk back from.

I know this. I sit on the rock and watch her anyway.

We drive back in the late afternoon. She has the camera in her lap and she's looking at it with an expression of renewed hope.