Victoria sat back in her chair and shook her head at what she was seeing on the screen.
“How is it possible that we have nothing usable?” she uttered into the silence of her empty office.
She’d spent the entire day combing through the upcoming issue and all of the shoots they had completed to date to see if there was anything that could be moved around. Her entire schedule had tumbled out of the window as the scandal took over everything.
The original problem still required a solution, finding a replacement spread for the next issue. Arrival had plenty of material—photoshoots often had images that weren’t used and could be recycled into other issues—but threading them together into a theme that worked was tricky. This was especially true as the best images had obviously been used before and the ones left over had been put aside for a reason.
Phoebe had provided Victoria with links to the vast Arrival photography database, allowing her to scroll through thousands of images in a complicated network of folders.
Victoria definitely thought she was developing carpal tunnel with the amount of scrolling and clicking she was doing with the trackpad of her laptop.
“Knock knock.”
She looked up and her eyes widened. “Steven! I’m sorry, I completely forgot.”
He laughed and nodded. “I’d assumed as much. It’s seven thirty and still not a peep from you.”
Victoria couldn’t believe it was that time already. She’d long ago sent the majority of the staff home, advising them that she needed them in the office first thing the following day. She figured that allowing them some of their Saturday evening off was a concession to the fact that she wanted them in on a Sunday morning.
She’d stayed, knowing the children were busy and having not heard from Holly. If she were at home, she’d be working, so she figured she might as well stay in the office.
Steven walked into the office and sat on the edge of her desk. “What disaster has befallen our illustrious magazine this time?”
“A certain male photographer couldn’t keep his hands to himself, so we need to remove any trace of him from the upcoming issue. Unfortunately, he worked on a very large spread for us, and we need to plug the gap. With no time to set up anything new due to cost and schedules, we need to find something in the database that we didn’t use in the past and pass it off as a fresh, new idea.” Victoria continued looking through folder after folder in the thousands upon thousands of images in the database.
“You must hate that,” he commented.
“I do,” she confirmed. “But it’s that, rush through something subpar, or cut the number of pages, which the advertising department has informed me is completely impossible. So, I’m scratching around on the database for something usable.”
She closed another pointless folder and let out a sigh. She turned to look at him and reached out to touch his hand. “I’m sorry I forgot about dinner. There’s been a lot going on, and then this popped up. I’m afraid time is more precious than usual at the moment.”
“It’s fine, but you do need to eat dinner, you know,” he looked at her sternly.
She rolled her eyes. What was everyone’s obsession with making sure she ate? It wasn’t as if she were going to wither away at her desk and be blown to ash by the air conditioning.
“I’ll get to it later,” she promised. She retracted her hand and turned to look back at her laptop screen.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll order something in, and we can share in here. I’ll keep to myself. I also have some work to get to. Then we both get to eat, and we’ve technically had dinner together. You might even be able to carve out a minute or two to actually speak to me.”
She didn’t reply, knowing full well that his mind was made up. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him get his smartphone out of his pocket and start typing on the screen, presumably searching for food delivery services.
Knowing that her productive evening was soon to come to an end, she hastened her search for something—anything—usable. She backed out of the folder she was in, clicked once too often, and found herself in unfamiliar territory in Phoebe’s filing system.
She read the folder names and saw one labelled Paris Fashion Week. Curious, she accessed the folder and saw a list of years. She selected the one for two years ago—the year Holly left.
“You don’t like Chinese food, do you?” Steven asked.
“It doesn’t like me,” Victoria clarified.
She leaned a little closer and looked at the dozens of folders: different designer previews, galas, parties, and more. At the bottom she saw a folder marked Misc. and opened it up.
Thousands of tiny thumbnails filled the screen, all the images that didn’t fit anywhere else. She previewed some of them and saw various shots that were either blurry or framed incorrectly, test shots, and behind-the-scenes images.
Victoria sought out images with Holly in them and tapped the spacebar to make them full size. A smile curled at her lips. It was strange seeing this Holly, this professional assistant that she hardly recognised anymore.
These days Holly was casual clothes and family dinners. Holly was warm, fluffy pyjamas and ridiculous puns that Victoria tried to keep from laughing at. Holly was home.
Holly in these images was someone she recognised but only a small part of the puzzle. She idly wondered when she had fallen in love with Holly. Was there any trace of those feelings all those months ago?
“Italian, or are you dieting? How is the whole of Italy not huge?”
Victoria opened another picture, this one of her and Gideon on the steps of an art gallery where a preview had taken place. She smiled; she liked the cut of Gideon’s jacket. She was about to move on to another image when something caught her eye. She pinched the trackpad and enlarged the background.
Steven stood at the top of the steps, a look of indescribable fury on his face. The look was directed at a retreating Holly. She looked distressed, possibly angry; it was difficult to tell with the angle, but Steven looked angrier than Victoria could even imagine. He’d always been so calm and placid, so the image was a shock.
She felt his hand on her shoulder.
“Ah,” he said softly. His grip tightened. “I really wish you hadn’t seen that.”