Chapter Eighteen

Two weeks after his return from Tulum, the remaining bills from the wedding came due.

Victor ignored the mail for several days. When the weekend arrived and he sat in his home office taking care of his personal finances, he tore through them.

The caterers had been given their payment the night of the reception, but they failed to bill him for the overage, since the guest list had increased nearly twenty percent. It didn’t matter that many of the guests had immediately left. The food had been ordered, cooked, and served. To whom, Victor couldn’t say.

The florist sent a receipt . . . he’d forgotten how much he wrote the check for.

He glanced at the envelope from a jeweler. It wasn’t the person he’d purchased Corrie’s ring from. He opened the mail and read the receipt. It was for a male wedding band.

Victor looked at his left hand.

Two thousand dollars?

The receipt stated paid in full, but it was in Victor’s name.

He logged into his personal bank site and opened the separate account he’d opened for Corrie to use for wedding expenses. In light of the fact that they weren’t yet married when he opened the temporary account, both their names were tied to it.

Not that she’d put any money in.

Weddings are expensive, she’d told him. If he wanted to be bugged constantly for questions like, “Do we want to add bacon to the salads and pay a dollar more a plate?” then he could stop working every time or just allow Corrie to take care of it.

Having more money than time, Victor cut a check and stepped back.

He looked at the balance on the account.

To her credit, it wasn’t at zero.

No, there was a $23.67 balance.

He compared the jeweler’s name to a check written against the account. Not that he cared to have a two-thousand-dollar wedding band instead of a bride to go with it. The names matched and he pushed the receipt aside.

He’d put twice as much money in the account than was the estimated need, which had him digging.

Early checks were written in deposit, some were posted the day of the botched wedding . . . and it appeared some were still due.

He skimmed the list, trying to muster up a little anger that he was paying for something he didn’t get. Although when you thought about it, he did get what he’d paid for. He paid for flowers, he saw them. He paid for food, his guests ate it. The bar bill . . . yeah, he’d gotten his money on that. He also paid for Corrie’s friends to fly to Mexico and their stay in the hotels. Even his friends refused him when he offered to pay their way.

What did he expect? Corrie was fifteen years younger than he.

He found Shannon Wentworth Photography and a check written for one thousand dollars.

Now, call him naive, but he didn’t think for one minute that was her total fee for flying to Mexico to be their photographer. And yet there wasn’t a second bill in the pack that he was sifting through.

He smiled at his resourcefulness as he picked up the phone.

Shannon answered on the second ring. “You’re seventy-five days early,” she said instead of hello.

Victor sat back in his office chair and propped his feet up on his desk. “Do you have a countdown clock like people use when they’re excited about a major life event?”

“Are you suggesting a phone call from you is a major life event?”

He heard laughter in her voice.

“Hello, Shannon.”

She sighed. “Hello, Victor.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I called?”

“No. I’m sure you’ll get around to it.”

She made him smile. “You sound good. Did I catch you at a decent time?”

“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Oh my God, Victor . . . yes. It’s a good time. Why are you calling?”

He could see her eyes narrowing, her lips pulling into thin lines. “Miss Annoyed is back. I kinda liked her.”

“Victor!” His name was a warning.

“Okay, okay, I actually did have a reason other than wanting to hear your voice.”

She paused. When she spoke again, her voice had lost some of its edge. “What’s your reason?”

“I think I owe you money.”

“Excuse me?”

He glanced at the pile on his desk. “I’m going through the wedding bills, and all I see is a deposit for the photographer.”

“Oh, that. Uhmm . . .”

“Shannon?”

“I don’t expect to get paid for something I didn’t do.”

“You flew all the way to Mexico for a job. You deserve to get paid for your time.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that.”

He kicked his feet off the desk, reached for a pen. “How much?”

“We’re even, Victor.”

“Shannon!”

“Oh, Mr. Annoyed has arrived.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. We’re good.”

“Do you want me to guess what your fee is and send you a check?” Because he would.

“I won’t cash it.”

“Then tell me a number.”

“Fine. Two hundred dollars.”

He started to write down the amount and paused. “That isn’t possible.”

“That’s my number, take it or leave it.”

“Why are you being difficult about this?”

“Because I don’t want your money,” she told him.

He dropped his pen. “That might be the first time I’ve ever heard that.”

She laughed. “That’s too bad.”

“You’re refreshing,” he told her.

“I have no business being anything to you for at least another seventy-five days.”

The fact she had the days down like a calendar made him grin as if he were a kid skipping school on a sunny day. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Goodbye, Victor.”

“Goodbye.”

He stared at his phone for five minutes and replayed their conversation in his head. Then he opened his calendar, counted seventy-five days ahead, and started a countdown clock. He titled it: Major Life Event.

Shannon hung up the phone as she sat surrounded by the portfolios she’d done when she was in college.

Victor calling didn’t surprise her, but his reason did.

There was no way she was taking any of his money. Not after she’d kissed the man. Not with a pending romantic date in seventy-five days. On some level, she knew her job as his photographer and going on a date were entirely different things, but it didn’t stop her from cutting him off.

Shannon Wentworth was finished taking money from men.

Especially men she kissed.

“Miss Annoyed,” she said to herself.

Shaking her head, she ducked back into the project in front of her. Each collection of photographs had a different purpose for the class she’d taken. In the beginning, she took her professor’s direction literally. When he assigned an urban setting, she went out and photographed all the angles and textures of Los Angeles. She remembered vividly the moment she saw her grade as a D. The doubt she’d harbored inside her heart about picking the class as her minor soared. Her second assignment had been “Through the eyes of a child.” The grade went to a C minus. Again, she pulled her hair out. The images she’d captured were exactly what the professor asked for. When she turned in her third assignment, her professor called her into his office.

He told her that if she was going to continue delivering photographs that anyone with a cell phone could take, that she should drop his class right then and there.

She was so upset to see her dream explode before she could even exercise it.

As she was leaving his office, tears down her face, he stopped her.

“How do you feel?” he asked. “One word. Tell me how you feel in one word.”

She had turned around, looked him in the eye. “Despair.”

“Good. Now go out there, capture despair . . . in the city, and the eyes of a child . . . anything. Prove to me you should be in my class.”

And she did.

Shannon picked up the portfolio of those pictures she’d taken all those years ago and flipped through them. With one word, one emotion, she found exactly what her instructor wanted. Her first stop was an animal shelter, where she found the solemn face of an emotionally wounded mixed breed dog. It took everything not to spring the animal and take it home. Then she took the same emotional wound on the face of a child sleeping in a makeshift tent with her parents under one of the many overpasses of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. That was when Shannon found her voice behind the camera.

She’d proved she belonged in the class and went on to capture the attention of the head of the photojournalism department. Some of her work ended up in the school newspaper.

When her professor encouraged her to reach out to the more mainstream media, Shannon retreated back into her shell. The turmoil of her sister’s independence had started to shake their parents’ patience and made life for Shannon more difficult. They expected her to fall in line even faster since her sister couldn’t find the damn thing. By the time Shannon was graduating college, Angie had long since dropped out.

Shannon sold out to the commercial end of photography. Because she came from an affluent family, she managed to book the occasional wedding. But her meals came from the stream of kids wanting their starts in Hollywood who were in need of reasonably priced headshots.