My Stepsister Is Photographing My Wedding to Someone Else novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Look at the One Thing
Romy tells Ivy to look at the one thing she wants, and the camera's preview shows Ivy looking at her stepsister, not her fiance.
"Look at the one thing you want," Romy said.
I was standing under an oak tree in Savannah with my fiance's hand around my waist.
The oak was draped in so much Spanish moss.
Romy Tillery stood ten feet away with a camera at her eye and a second one hanging off her shoulder.
She was my stepsister, and I had known her for exactly four years and about nine days in total.
"I am looking at the thing I want," I said. "He's right here."
"You're looking at his collar," Romy said.
Troy laughed behind me.
I could feel it through his chest.
"She's got you, Ivy," he said.
"I'm not looking at his collar."
"You've been looking at his collar for twenty minutes." Romy lowered the camera an inch. "Give me your chin."
She walked over, which I had not expected.
Up close she smelled like sunscreen and warm metal.
Her hair was bleached almost white and cut short enough to show her ears.
She had an aperture tattoo on her left forearm, and a pair of canvas straps crossed her vest.
Two fingers touched the bottom of my jaw.
She tilted my face a half inch to the left, toward the light.
"There," she said quietly. "Hold that."
My whole face went warm, and not from the October sun.
I told myself it was because she was a stranger who touched people for a living.
She was not a stranger, though.
She was June's daughter, and June had been married to my father for four years.
I had met Romy at their courthouse wedding when I was twenty-four and she was twenty-two.
We were both adults, we had both shaken hands in a hallway, and we had both eaten the same sheet cake.
Since then I had seen her at two Christmases and one family dinner.
I had not known she was this tall.
Romy stepped back and raised the camera again.
"Okay, Ivy. Forget the lens. Forget me. Forget the nice man holding you."
"I'm not forgetting him."
"Fine, remember him." The shutter clicked once. "Just look at the one thing you want right now. Not what you're supposed to want."
I didn't answer.
"Anything," Romy said. "A bird. A building. Your shoes."
I looked at the first thing my eyes wanted.
The shutter clicked three times, fast.
I heard Troy's phone buzz in his pocket.
"Sorry," he said. "That's the pilot station. I've got to take this."
He kissed my temple and walked off across the square with the phone to his ear.
He did not look back, and he didn't seem to be in a hurry.
Romy kept shooting.
"Don't move yet," she said.
"He's gone."
"I know. That's why you're allowed to breathe."
I breathed.
It surprised me how much I'd been holding.
I'd been engaged for fourteen months, and the wedding was three weeks away.
I had a spreadsheet for the florist, a spreadsheet for the seating, and a spreadsheet for the spreadsheets.
I was twenty-eight years old and I was good at being sure.
Romy lowered the camera and looked at the back screen.
She went still.
It was a very small kind of still, the kind you'd miss if you weren't standing close.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing. Light's good."
"You went quiet."
"I do that when I find a keeper."
She didn't offer to show me.
I walked over and looked over her arm, because I'm an accountant and I check things.
The screen showed me under the oak tree.
My chin was tilted, and my gray eyes were wide open and wet with sun.
Troy's blue jacket was a blur at the very edge of the frame.
I was not looking at the collar, or the tree, or the bird.
I was looking straight into the lens, and my whole face was open.
I knew that it wasn't the lens I was looking at.
It was the person holding it.
"That one's not for the album," Romy said.
Her voice was flat and careful.
"Delete it," I said.
"I don't delete the real ones." She turned the screen away from me. "I'll put it in a folder you never have to open."
Across the square, Troy put his phone away and strolled back to us.
He looked at the screen over Romy's shoulder for a long moment.
I waited for him to frown.
He didn't.
"Keep that one," he said.
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