The hum of the hard drives was the only sound in Caleb’s apartment. It was a sterile space, all concrete floors and minimalist furniture, a world away from the chaotic opulence of Napa and the rugged grandeur of Wyoming.
Here, in the controlled dark of his editing suite, Caleb was supposed to be king. He was the narrator, the one who shaped reality into a story of his choosing.
But tonight, the story was fighting back.
On the main monitor, a timeline stretched out, a digital mountain range of clips from the last two weddings. He’d spent hours meticulously logging the footage, tagging moments with keywords: Chaos. Farce. Meltdown. Performative. Cringe.
The building blocks of his scathing takedown, For Better or for Footage, were all there.
He clicked on a clip labeled Napa_GarterSnake_Reaction_04. A bridesmaid, her face a mask of terror, shrieked as the snake slithered under a table.
It was objectively funny, a perfect indictment of a stupid tradition gone wrong. This was the easy stuff, the low-hanging fruit he’d set out to gather.
He dragged it into the rough-cut sequence, a cynical smirk playing on his lips.
But his mouse hovered, then drifted to another folder. Willa_Napa.
He double-clicked, and she filled the screen. The same incident, but from a different angle.
Willa, her expression not of panic but of exasperated competence, was calmly corralling the hysterical best man with one hand while pointing a busboy toward the source of the commotion with the other.
“It’s a harmless garter snake,” her voice, clear and steady over the din, cut through the noise. “Someone please get it a saucer of champagne; it’s clearly had a long day.”
A ghost of a laugh escaped him. He hadn’t even realized he’d kept the camera on her for that long.
He’d told himself it was for B-roll, for establishing the presence of the ever-present “wedding planner.” But watching it now, it wasn’t B-roll.
It was the main event. While everyone else was losing their minds, she was holding the entire ridiculous affair together with dry wit and an emergency kit.
He scrubbed forward, past the recovered ceremony footage she’d helped him salvage, and landed in Wyoming. The rehearsal dinner brawl.
Documentary gold, he’d thought at the time. He found the clip he was looking for: the father of the bride, red-faced and roaring, launching himself toward the groom’s smug uncle.
The camera work was shaky—because he’d put the camera down. He’d put it down to step between them, his hand on the uncle’s chest, feeling the man’s heart hammer against his palm.
And in the background of the shot, a flash of cranberry red. Willa. She wasn’t screaming.
She wasn’t running. She was flanking the sobbing bride, her body a physical shield, her voice a low, fierce murmur that seemed to cut through the drunken testosterone.
He watched himself on screen, a stranger in his own footage, looking over his shoulder, his eyes finding hers for a split second across the chaos. A silent acknowledgment. I’ve got this side, you get that one. A team.
His finger twitched on the mouse. This wasn’t a scathing takedown.
This was… something else entirely. He was capturing the absurdity, yes, but he was also unintentionally documenting a quiet heroism he hadn’t known existed in this world of rented tuxes and fondant towers.
He pulled up the footage from the balcony. The sharp, majestic peaks of the Tetons were silhouetted against a sky bruised with twilight.
And there they were, two small figures against the vastness. He zoomed in, the audio scratching to life.
Her voice, softer now, telling him about her parents’ simple, unshakeable love. His own voice, rough with whiskey and a bitterness he hadn’t let anyone hear in years, talking about his divorce.
He watched the moment he’d almost kissed her. The air on screen seemed to crackle with it.
He saw the slight tilt of her head, the way her eyes darkened. He saw his own hand lift, then fall.
He felt the phantom pull in his chest all over again, the jarring collision of his cynical mission and the undeniable, terrifying sincerity of the woman sitting next to him.
Two narratives.
One was the story he’d sold to his producer, Julian. It was a film about the hollow spectacle of the wedding industry, a cynical exposé designed for film festivals and streaming deals.
It was his ticket out of filming other people’s fake happiness and into making something “real.”
The other story was an accidental portrait of Willa Grant. It was a film about grace under pressure, about a woman who believed in love so fiercely she could coax it out of even the most disastrous situations.
A woman who fixed corrupted memory cards and feuding families with the same unwavering resolve.
A woman who was making him question the entire premise of his film, and of his life for the past three years.
His phone buzzed on the desk, rattling against a coffee mug. The screen lit up: JULIAN PRODUCER.
Caleb’s stomach tightened. He let it ring twice before swiping to answer, his voice flatter than he intended. “Yeah.”
“Voss! My man!” Julian’s voice was slick with an enthusiasm Caleb suddenly found grating.
“I just finished the dailies from Wyoming. Holy hell, kid. This is it! This is the gold!”
Caleb stared at the screen, at Willa’s face frozen mid-laugh. “It was a mess.”
“A mess? It was Shakespearean! Two houses, both alike in dignity, in fair Jackson Hole where we lay our scene! The drunken toast, the brawl—you can’t write this stuff! The tension is incredible. And your little wedding planner character? The earnest believer trying to hold it all together? She’s the perfect foil! The audience is going to eat it up.”
Character. The word landed like a punch. Julian didn’t see Willa. He saw a narrative device. A cliché.
“Her name is Willa,” Caleb said, the words sharp.
“Willa, right, whatever. She’s great. So what’s the plan for the finale? This Newport Bridezilla thing sounds epic. You gotta push it, man. We need the emotional climax. I want to see the mask crack. I want to see this Willa person finally break under the pressure. That’s your third act turning point. The moment the romantic finally admits the whole thing is a sham.”
A cold dread washed over Caleb. Julian wasn’t just asking him to film a disaster; he was asking him to engineer one.
To capture Willa at her lowest point and frame it as the documentary’s triumphant thesis. He wanted to use her genuine heart as the final exhibit in his case against love itself.
“I’m a documentarian, Julian,” Caleb said, the lie tasting like ash in his mouth. “I just film what happens.”
“Right, right. ‘Fly on the wall.’ Got it,” Julian said, a smirk audible in his voice.
“Just make sure that fly is buzzing right in the Bridezilla’s ear when she goes nuclear. Get the tears. Get the shouting. Get me a goddamn wedding apocalypse. This project is going to make your career, Caleb. Don’t get soft on me now.”
The line went dead.
Caleb dropped the phone onto the desk. The silence of the apartment rushed back in, heavier than before.
He felt cheap, exposed. He looked at the two narratives laid out before him on the screen.
The scathing industry takedown. The unexpected portrait of Willa.
For the first time, he realized they weren’t just competing stories. One was a lie built on half-truths, and the other was a truth he had stumbled into by accident.
His ambition, the bitter, cynical drive that had fueled him since his marriage imploded, was at war with the quiet respect and burgeoning affection he felt for a woman who represented everything he claimed to despise. To finish the film Julian wanted, he would have to betray her.
He would have to stand by with his camera while her world, or at least the Newport corner of it, burned down around her. He’d have to capture her pain and edit it into proof of his own jaded worldview.
He could quit. He could call Julian back, tell him the project was dead, and wire back the advance.
He could delete all the footage and go back to shooting soulless corporate events to pay the bills. The thought was nauseating. It felt like failure.
Don’t get soft on me now.
No. He was a professional. He had a contract. He had a vision. Or, he’d had one.
He could do both, a voice in his head rationalized. He could have it all.
The logic was flawed, a desperate compromise, but it took root. He would go to Newport.
He would shoot the wedding. He would capture everything, just as he had before.
He’d get the footage, all of it. And then, only when the summer was over, when he was safely back in the sterile darkness of his editing bay, would he decide.
He would decide which story was the real one. He would decide what to do with Willa.
It felt like a sensible plan, a way to delay the impossible choice. But as he clicked back to the timeline and found the clip of Willa on the balcony, her eyes shining in the moonlight as she talked about love being a choice, not a fairytale, he knew it was just a more sophisticated kind of lie.
He was choosing to deceive her, just for a little while longer, hoping he could film his way to an answer that wouldn’t completely destroy him. Or her.