Chapter 2
Chapter Two: The Morning
She woke at five forty-seven to birdsong and light.
Not London light. Tuscany light — already warm at this hour, already certain of itself, coming through the pale linen curtains and lying down across the floor in long oblongs. She lay still for a moment listening to the bird in the cypress tree outside the window. Something she didn't know the name of. Something unambiguously cheerful.
Four seconds of peace. Then she remembered where she was, and why, and the peace became something more complicated.
She dressed, took her camera, and went out into the morning.
The villa at six AM was entirely hers. She moved through the main hall and out onto the rear terrace and then down into the garden, and she walked the way she always walked destination venues on the morning before a wedding — slowly, learning the light, cataloguing the angles. The vineyard slope, west-facing, gold from four in the afternoon. The olive grove on the south side, those ancient twisted trunks that caught the early light in long diagonals between the leaves. A stone bench at the edge of the property with a view of the hills that went on and on, the distant villages pale against the hillside.
She sat on the bench for ten minutes. She let the view settle into her.
This was the part she'd kept, through all of it. This habit — the early morning, the empty venue, the long slow process of learning where the light was and what it would do. She'd built the rest of herself from fragments after Leo, piece by piece, some things gone and some things different and some things reinforced almost past recognition. But this she'd kept whole. The camera and the morning and the practice of being useful somewhere she was needed.
She took photographs of the olive grove. She took photographs of the vineyard in the rising light. She took a photograph of a single spider's web between two rosemary plants that she knew would be technically perfect and commercially useless and which she took anyway, because some things you photograph for yourself.
Back inside for breakfast. The room was sun-filled, windows on two sides, a long table set for twenty with bread and honey and fruit and a coffee press she reached for before she'd fully assessed the room.
She was doing well. She had made it through a night in the same building as Leo Harrington and she was standing and caffeinated and professionally functional and this was all going to be absolutely—
He walked in.
Running clothes. Slightly damp at the collar. He'd been out early — she could see it in the flush along his jaw, the particular quality of alertness that she knew, that she'd recognised for years, Leo at six AM ready to do something while she was still negotiating with the concept of consciousness. She had resented this cheerfully for most of the four years they were together.
He stopped when he saw her. A fractional pause. Almost nothing.
She turned back to her coffee. "Morning."
"Morning," he said.
He crossed to the coffee press. Black, no sugar. She had not forgotten this about him. She had tried to forget a great many things about him and succeeded with some and failed with others, and the coffee was in the failure category, along with the way he moved through rooms and the look on his face when he was working through a problem and the particular quality of his attention when he was listening to something that mattered to him.
The garden beyond the window was very beautiful. She concentrated on it.
"You were up early," he said.
"I always walk the venue before the wedding party wakes." Professional, pleasant. "It helps me understand the light."
"I saw you," he said. "From the terrace. The olive grove."
She hadn't known he was watching. She sat with this information for a moment and decided not to do anything with it.
"The light through those trees at this hour is going to be useful for portraits," she said.
"I'll remember." A pause. "James and Sophie are doing portraits tomorrow afternoon. I'm in them."
"Golden hour. I've already identified the location — the vineyard slope, facing west." She looked at him, because looking at portrait subjects was a professional act. He was looking back at her in the way he always had, the look that was careful and thorough and underneath that — she stopped.
"Good," he said, and poured his coffee.
George Beaumont arrived, blessedly, with the contented air of a man in possession of a beautiful morning and no requirement to do anything with it. He ate his bread and honey and observed the view and told Ellie about Sophie at four years old sitting in an olive grove in the Chianti hills, and she promised to get him a version of that photograph, and the morning continued.
The wedding party woke by degrees. Ellie moved through the breakfast room and then the terrace and then the garden, taking the photographs that happened between the planned ones — Diana Beaumont and Marguerite Harrington at the garden table with their espressos, each with the measure of the other and finding it satisfactory. Annabelle and Freya with their feet in the pool. Robert and George walking the vineyard in the slow companionable way of fathers who have found a language in their children.
And Sophie, sweeping in at half past eight in pale blue, announcing that it was today — "Actually it's tomorrow," James said — and accepting his mild correction with a kiss on his cheek that he turned helplessly into.
She photographed all of it.
There were two late arrivals at breakfast she hadn't seen the night before — they'd come in from Florence that morning. One was Annabelle's boyfriend, a cheerful accountant from Bristol. The other was a man in his early thirties who came in from the terrace with a coffee already in his hand, said something in Italian to Giulia who laughed and replied in kind, and who was introduced to the table as Marco Conte — James's mother's nephew, which made him, by some calculation Ellie didn't follow, a cousin of some kind.
He was dark-haired and had good cheekbones and smiled easily, and when she looked across the table she saw Cara register his arrival with an expression that was thoroughly professional except for the small involuntary adjustment she made to her posture.
Ellie filed this away for later.
She worked through the long warm morning — the documentary work she loved best, the unscripted hours before a wedding when people simply existed in a beautiful place and let her see them. She did not photograph Leo. He was present throughout — by the pool with a book, on the terrace with James, briefly in the garden talking to Marguerite — and she catalogued his presence the way she catalogued everything, observationally, professionally, and from a distance that she felt as a kind of active maintenance.
At one point they arrived at the narrow villa doorway from opposite directions at the same moment. Both stopped. A brief absurd negotiation.
"Go ahead," he said.
"No, you—"
"Ellie." A trace of something — not quite amusement. "Please."
She went through. The doorway was narrow enough that she was aware of him just behind her — the warmth, the quiet — and then she was through and into the main hall and there was space again.
"Thank you," she said, without turning.
"You're welcome," he said.
She went upstairs.
Lunch on the south terrace, long and warm, Sophie beside her for part of it. They talked about photography — what Ellie saw, what she was looking for, the moment before people knew they were being photographed. Sophie listened with the attention of someone who genuinely wanted to understand rather than be polite about it, and when she said your photographs know what love costs Ellie felt it land somewhere under the professional surface, and she meant her thank you completely.
At some point Cara materialised beside her. "Marco Conte," she said, in a tone of careful neutrality, "is apparently an architect. From Rome."
"Is he."
"He is. He and Leo apparently know each other through work, which is — interesting. From a contextual standpoint."
Ellie looked at her. "Are you observing the context in which the wedding occurs?"
"I observe everything," Cara said. "It's my job." She drank her wine. "He has good hands."
"Cara."
"For photography purposes." She paused. "I'm going to stop talking about this now."
"Thank you."
"You're welcome." She reached for the bread. "Leo's been looking at you roughly every fourth time you're in his eyeline, by the way. I counted."
"Cara."
"I'm done. I'm eating bread. I'm professionally focused."
Ellie picked up her camera.
After lunch she went up to edit the morning's shots. A habit — to review the reel while the light was still fresh in her memory, to find what she'd taken before she'd known she was taking it.
She was forty images into the sequence when she found the accidental photograph.
She hadn't meant to take it. She'd been adjusting her frame on James and Sophie in the garden — wide aperture, shallow depth of field — and in the periphery of the shot, soft and blurred, was Leo. On the far bench near the olive grove. Reading.
But not reading.
His head was angled wrong for reading. When she looked at the shape of him in the blurred warmth of the background, the specific angle of his face — the aperture had caught enough to see — he was looking at her. Not at the camera. At her, mid-movement, between one frame and the next, when she was just moving through the world.
She sat with it on her screen for a long time.
She should delete it.
She moved on to the next photograph. Then came back.
She looked at it again — the out-of-focus warmth of him, the angle of his face, the quality of attention even blurred and peripheral. She had been photographing people for six years. She knew what that angle meant. She knew what it looked like when someone was watching a thing they missed.
She closed the editing software without deleting it.
She sat on the edge of the bed with her camera in her lap and she looked at the valley below and she thought about Shoreditch.
The flat had been hers first. A one-bedroom above a bakery on a narrow street east of the Overground — she'd found it at twenty-four and stayed because the light from the kitchen window was good in the mornings and because it smelled of bread at six AM and because it was hers in the way that the first place you feel genuinely adult is yours.
Leo had not moved in so much as accumulated. A toothbrush first. Then a change of clothes. Then the architectural drawings that she'd found on her kitchen table one morning with coffee rings on them and which she'd moved to the counter with a kind of tenderness that surprised her. Then his books on the shelf alongside hers, and the second coffee press — larger than hers, because he drank more of it — and the way he'd reorganised the spice rack without asking her and she'd looked at it for three days waiting to be annoyed about it and never quite got there.
The night she realised she was in love with him, she'd been sitting on the kitchen counter eating cereal at eleven PM — she'd been editing late, she'd forgotten dinner — and he'd come in from a long day and immediately put the kettle on without saying anything and then leaned against the opposite counter and looked at her with that careful, thorough look, and she'd thought: oh.
She'd thought: this is the person I want to be in this kitchen with.
She'd put the cereal bowl down. She'd looked at him — at his face in the low light of the kitchen, at the way he was already looking back at her, and she'd known he knew, and she'd thought: I'm not afraid of this.
She had not been afraid of it, once.
That was the part that had changed.
She opened her editing software.
She went back to the accidental photograph.
She looked at it for one more long moment — the soft blurred shape of him, the angle of his face — and she thought about the person she'd been in that kitchen at eleven PM, eating cereal, unafraid of her own heart, and she thought about how far she'd had to go to become this careful version of herself instead.
She closed the software.
She picked up her camera and went back to work.
Cara found her in the garden at three, crouched over a photograph of the rosebush by the terrace wall.
"Rehearsal at four," Cara said.
"I know."
"Are you ready?"
Ellie stood. She checked her lens cap, her settings. The practical actions that always settled her. "I'm always ready."
Cara looked at her with the patience of someone who understood this to be both true and beside the point. "I mean for the part where we are in the same place as—"
"I know what you mean." She looked at the rosebush. At some point it was going to get less difficult. At some point — not today, and maybe not this weekend, but at some point — she was going to be able to be in the same vicinity as Leo Harrington and feel nothing in particular. She was going to file him in the finished category and leave him there and that was going to work.
She was working on it.
"I'm fine," she said, which was partially true.
"I know," Cara said, which was not an agreement.
They walked in from the garden together.
In the direction of the terrace, Marco Conte was saying something in Italian to one of the kitchen staff that made her laugh. Cara, imperceptibly, slowed her pace.
"Cara," Ellie said.
"I'm walking," Cara said. "I'm simply walking at a normal pace."
"A very specific pace."
"It's the cobblestones." She kept her eyes front. "I find cobblestones require more careful navigation."
Ellie pressed her lips together. She said nothing. She filed the observation alongside everything else she was carrying — the photograph she hadn't deleted, the warm weight of the kitchen in Shoreditch, the angle of Leo's face on the far bench — and she walked through the warm Tuscan afternoon toward the rehearsal.