Face Your Fears

Chapter 34

June in Boonsboro, Maryland was killer.

The heat was sticky and clogged my throat any time I inhaled - but it wasn't like I was complaining. I happened to love the summer.

And even if I was a guy and wasn't supposed to get excited about these kinds of things, I had to admit it was the perfect day for a wedding. I was looking at it purely from a photographer's point of view, of course, and the clear blue sky was my best friend at the moment. Well, it'd make shadowing a problem, but that was fixed easily enough.

I had, however, never shot a wedding before. Not that the opportunity hadn't come up, but it was awfully hard to capture every possible shot when you were the lone man on the job, and I didn't have an assistant.

But when Rebecca, Chris' only sister and my aunt, had called me in a panic a few weeks ago because their wedding photographer had bailed at the last moment, I'd agreed to do the job without a second thought.

How could I refuse to photograph my aunt's wedding? I would've been disowned by my mother if I hadn't.

Ever since my impromptu jaunt down to Boonsboro the other month, and Rebecca had discovered she had three nieces she knew nothing about, contact had flourished between us all.

Rebecca and the girls were constantly on the phone with one another, and she'd even come back to the city a few weekends ago, after Milo's baptism, so the girls could show her the sights.

My mother's relationship with her sister-in-law had improved considerably, though I suspected there was still some bitter feelings there because my mother hadn't told Rebecca she was pregnant when Chris was killed.

Things were improving, however tense they still might be, and I wasn't willing to rock the boat - like where Irene and Carter, Chris' parents, were concerned. If things were to get better, it would happen in its own time, because I was done meddling.

So my mother, my little sisters, Hadley and our son, made the four hour drive down into Boonsboro for Rebecca's wedding in mid-June. Rebecca had asked the girls to be her bridesmaids a few months ago, and they'd thoroughly enjoyed the whole process leading up to the wedding.

And this left me with the daunting task of finding an assistant for the wedding who could at least competently handle a camera, which wound up being -

"Carlo, I swear to God, if you take one more photo of that girl's ass, I'm going to weigh you down with cinder blocks and dump you in the Hudson."

My cousin burst into a round of immature giggles, wiggling his eyebrows at me. "What are you, le mafioso? Don't be such a spoil sport, Archer. You can't honestly tell me you aren't enjoying the view here."

A surprising amount of Rebecca's old sorority sisters came into town for the wedding, which Carlo was thoroughly enjoying, which was in turn thoroughly annoying the hell out of me.

"Coglione, I'm married."

"So? Doesn't mean you can't look, my man. Who's the coglione now, eh?"