The air in the terminal bar at SFO tasted of stale beer and recycled anxiety. It was a purgatory of delayed flights and overpriced cocktails, a place where time stretched and warped.
Willa Grant sat at a small, perpetually sticky table, nursing a glass of sauvignon blanc she definitely couldn’t expense, trying to force the chaos of the last wedding into neat, color-coded folders on her laptop.
She had a system for everything, a process to contain the pandemonium she professionally managed. But there was no folder for him.
She saw him before he saw her. Caleb Voss was leaning against the bar, a silhouette of cynical indifference against the garish glow of a sports ticker.
He was scrolling through his phone, a faint scowl etched onto his face that seemed to be his default setting. His presence was an unwelcome splinter in her carefully planned transit day.
Three weddings. A summer tour from hell, as Mads had so aptly named it. One down, two to go.
Taking a fortifying sip of wine, she closed her laptop with a decisive snap. Procrastination was a luxury she couldn’t afford, and that included dealing with the brooding camera guy who documented disaster with the glee of a pyromaniac at a fireworks factory.
She walked over, her heels making a sharp, no-nonsense sound on the linoleum floor. “Voss.”
He looked up, and for a half-second, his eyes registered surprise before the familiar mask of wry detachment slid back into place.
“Grant. I was wondering when our paths would cross. I had my money on the security line.”
“I have TSA PreCheck,” she said, as if it were a moral failing on his part that he didn’t. “We need to talk.”
He raised an eyebrow, gesturing to the empty stool beside him. “By all means. Can I buy you a seven-dollar bottle of water?”
“I have my own,” she said, ignoring the stool and remaining standing, an unconscious power move. “This next wedding. Jackson Hole. Then Newport. It seems we’re stuck with each other.”
“A cosmic joke of the highest order,” he agreed, taking a slow sip of his beer. “What’s the problem? Worried I’ll catch the bride’s secret second cousin trying to steal a centerpiece?”
“I’m worried you’ll actively root for it,” she retorted, her voice low and even.
“Look, your whole ‘detached artist documenting reality’ thing is… fine. But my job is to curate a perfect day, not to provide B-roll for your cynical little student film.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s not a student film. And reality is rarely perfect.”
“Which is why my job exists,” she shot back.
“I’m the airbrush. You’re the unflattering fluorescent light. We are, by nature, at odds. And since we have to do this two more times, I’m proposing a truce.”
Caleb leaned forward, elbows on the bar, a flicker of genuine interest in his gaze. “A truce? I wasn’t aware we were at war. I thought this was more of a passive-aggressive cold war.”
“Let’s call it a preventative ceasefire,” Willa said, allowing a small, dry smile.
“I need you to not actively seek out the drama. When the maid of honor starts crying because the shade of periwinkle isn’t what she envisioned, I need you to point your camera at the happy couple, not zoom in on her mascara tears.”
“But the mascara tears are the truth, Grant,” he argued, though there was no heat in it. It was a familiar debate, a well-worn groove in their short acquaintance.
“The truth is that it’s their wedding day, and they’re in love. The rest is just noise. My job is to filter the noise. Your job,” she said, pointing a finger at him, “is to film the wedding they paid for. Not the one you think they deserve.”
He was quiet for a long moment, studying her. He saw the fatigue behind the professionalism, the faint lines of stress around her eyes that her perfect makeup couldn’t quite conceal.
He remembered her face in the dim hotel conference room, illuminated by the glow of a laptop screen, her brow furrowed in concentration as she meticulously recovered his footage. She hadn’t gloated. She had simply helped.
“Okay,” he said, the single word hanging in the air between them.
Willa blinked. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he repeated. “A truce. I will endeavor to focus my lens on the… less overtly disastrous elements of the proceedings. I won’t interview any bridesmaids about their existential dread.”
“Thank you.” She sounded genuinely surprised.
“On one condition,” he added, a glint of mischief returning to his eyes.
“Of course there’s a condition.”
“You have to admit,” he said, leaning closer, his voice dropping, “that the garter-snake incident was, objectively, hilarious.”
Despite herself, the corner of Willa’s mouth twitched. “It was a liability nightmare that nearly gave the bride’s grandmother a heart attack.”
“But the look on the best man’s face when he realized it wasn’t a rubber toy…” Caleb chuckled, a low, genuine sound that was far more disarming than his usual smirk.
“Come on. That was comedy gold.”
A laugh escaped her, a short, sharp burst of sound she couldn’t contain. “Fine. It was a little funny. In hindsight. From a great distance.”
The tension between them seemed to dissolve in that shared moment of laughter. Willa finally relented, taking the stool beside him.
The air shifted. They were no longer adversaries negotiating terms, but two weary travelers sharing a moment of respite.
“How do you do it?” he asked, his tone shifting from playful to curious. “Stay so… invested. After seeing all that.”
“Because for every meltdown over a seating chart, there’s a moment that’s real,” she said, swirling the wine in her glass.
“The groom when he sees the bride for the first time. The father-daughter dance. My parents… they have that. A simple, quiet love that’s lasted forty years. It’s not a fairytale, it’s just… real. I see pieces of it at every wedding, and that’s the part I choose to focus on.”
Caleb watched her, listening. He’d built an entire thesis around the idea that those moments were a performance, a facade for the camera.
But hearing her talk, seeing the unvarnished sincerity in her eyes, he felt a crack appear in his cynical foundation. She wasn’t performing. She actually believed it.
“My parents’ marriage was more like a long-running, poorly scripted tragedy,” he said, the words coming out before he could stop them.
He never talked about this. Not with anyone. “My divorce was the series finale.”
“I’m sorry,” Willa said softly, her expression softening with an empathy that felt both comforting and profoundly unsettling.
“Don’t be. It’s what fuels my ‘cynical little student film’,” he said, trying to steer them back to the safety of sarcasm, but the words felt hollow.
An announcement for their flight to Jackson Hole crackled over the intercom. Willa started to gather her things, a subtle return to her usual efficiency.
“Wait,” Caleb said. He pulled out his phone, his thumb hovering over the camera icon. “Just a sec.”
“What are you doing?”
“Testing the light,” he lied, the excuse automatic. It was his go-to line. “The lighting in here is awful. Just want to see how the sensor handles the grain.”
He lifted the phone and framed her face in the screen. And everything stopped.
It wasn’t a technical exercise. It was an impulse, a sudden, desperate need to capture the woman sitting in front of him.
The bar’s dim, moody lighting that he’d just maligned fell across her face, catching the gold flecks in her brown eyes and the determined set of her jaw. She looked at him, not with suspicion, but with a kind of open curiosity.
A faint, tired smile played on her lips.
Through the small screen, he saw her not as a character—The Organizer, The Believer—but as Willa.
He saw the woman who had calmly wrangled a live snake, who had salvaged his professional reputation without asking for anything in return, who spoke of her parents’ love with a quiet reverence that made his chest ache.
And then, a wave of guilt, so sharp and nauseating it was like a physical blow, crashed over him.
Every cynical voice-over he had recorded, every snarky comment he’d scripted in his head, suddenly felt like a betrayal. His documentary was supposed to be a clever, scathing takedown of an industry built on fantasy.
But this—the sincerity in her gaze, her unwavering belief in the good, messy, complicated core of it all—wasn’t fantasy. It was just a different kind of reality.
A reality his project was designed to ignore, to mock, to invalidate.
Filming her felt wrong. It felt like theft.
He was using his camera, the tool of his trade and his armor against the world, and turning it on the one person who had shown him a kindness he hadn’t deserved. The pang of guilt wasn’t just serious; it was seismic.
It shook the very foundations of the story he thought he was telling.
“The grain’s pretty bad,” he mumbled, lowering the phone and shoving it into his pocket, his hand suddenly clammy. The image of her face was seared into his mind.
“Right,” Willa said, slinging her laptop bag over her shoulder. “Well. Boarding call. Shall we?”
He nodded, unable to find his voice. He grabbed his own bag and fell into step beside her as they walked toward the gate, part of the anonymous river of travelers.
The truce was in place, a flimsy set of rules for their professional coexistence. But as they walked, a new, unspoken rule book was being written, one that had nothing to do with their jobs and everything to do with the woman by his side and the dishonest secret he was keeping from her.
The summer, he realized with a sinking heart, was going to be even more complicated than he thought.