Page 19 of Matchmaking On The Menu

I hesitate. “He said he likes small town stories.”

All three blink. What’s with these guys moving in sync today?

“So,” Quadri says slowly, “you talked to him longer than anyone else here combined, and all you learned is that he likes small towns?”

“He asked about the diner. The history and stuff.” I don’t mention our chat about my conflicted life plans. I sound way too defensive as it is.

“Classic casing-the-joint behavior,” Mary says. “If he makes a skin suit out of you, I’m telling the police I warned you.”

“You need help,” Quadri says. “Maybe try a romcom or two for a while.”

“We all saw sparks,” Shelly adds.

“If you saw sparks, call an electrician.” I wipe down the already-spotless counter. “He was just another customer.”

“Sure,” Mary says. “You were practically glowing.”

I sigh. “All right. Fryer’s not cleaned. Back to work.”

“You’re deflecting,” Quadri sings.

“He’s just another stranger passing through,” I snap. “We’re probably never going to see him again. So you can all stop writing your own home-brew soap opera and scrub something.”

They groan and disperse. But what Shelly said lingers. If he was an ex-con, that level of pent-up enthusiasm would be… interesting.

God.

I need to get laid. Unluckily for me, in small towns like this, one date and the guy wants to know how many kids you want. That’s a tricky question when you don’t even know what you want to do with your life next week.

4

TEDDY

WAITING FOR A SUBJECT THAT HASN’T ENTERED THE FRAME

The saying “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”—or some version of that sentimental crap—has been stuck in my head all day. Except this isn’t about love, it’s about photography. It’s about the possibility that I already had the thing that mattered most and somehow lost it. That thought terrifies me more than I’d like to admit. It’s a slow-building pressure behind my ribs, tightening a little more every day.

The woods are quiet, but not silent. Leaves rustle overhead. Birds call somewhere deeper among the trees. A branch creaks in the distance. Everything feels muted, as if someone turned the volume down on the world.

Late afternoon sunlight filters through the canopy, washing everything in gold. It’s the kind of light photographers spend hours chasing. The kind of light I used to chase. I raise the camera and take the shot. When I look at the image, I already know what I’m going to find. The exposure is perfect, the composition balanced. The light cuts through the trees exactly the way it should.

Yet I feel absolutely nothing.

A bird breaks from the canopy above me, startling in the quiet. I watch it catch a thermal and dance freely in the sky.

I scroll through the rest of the photographs I’ve taken today. A crooked mailbox. Fog hanging over a field. Light catching the autumn leaves. Technically they’re excellent. The sort of photographs that built my career. The sort of photographs clients still pay ridiculous amounts of money for.

Not a single image makes my pulse quicken. Not one feels important.

I used to know before I even pressed the shutter. I’d see something and feel it immediately, like a hook catching beneath my ribs and pulling me toward it. Photography wasn’t something I did back then, it was something I couldn’t stop myself from doing. Now it feels like I’m going through the motions of someone else’s life.

It would be different if the work was bad. I could fix bad. I could change the angle, find better light, choose a stronger subject. There are solutions for bad photographs. There aren’t many solutions for staring at your best work and realizing it no longer means anything to you.

Everyone assumes burnout looks dramatic. A breakdown. A public collapse. Some spectacular explosion that leaves obvious damage behind. This isn’t that. It’s stealthier. It’s waking up every morning, hoping the passion will come back and going to sleep wondering if it ever will. It’s looking at work people call exceptional and feeling absolutely nothing in return. I want to want it again. That’s the whole thing. I want to pick up my camera and feel excited. I want to see something ordinary and get that spark—the spark that tells me it matters. I want to stop wondering whether I’ve spent my entire adult life building a career around something that’s already slipping away from me.

Boudica Springs wasn’t part of some grand plan to recapture that. No, I chose it because it was far enough away that nobody knew my name. Far enough away that I could figure out whether photography was still mine. So far, I haven’t. Well, except my first day. Not for the first time since I met Dannica in the diner, do I wish I’d had my camera on me.

The thought is ridiculous. I’ve spent two weeks chasing perfect light through forests and fields, and somehow the most interesting thing I’ve seen since arriving in Boudica Springs was a beautiful waitress rattling off headlines under her breath as she poured coffee.