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anything. And I wasn’t about to start now.
    Cadence pointed to my wrist, to the scarf. “That scarf got in your way again, didn’t it? Or was it the North Wing?”
    That right there was exactly why I would never tell her anything about me and any guy.
    I confided in her years ago about images that I could see and whispers I could hear in my mind. Even though I was blushing with a warm excitement at the time, she managed to jerk me down into the cold reality by saying I had a crush on a ghost, someone that had been long gone and was clearly in love with another girl. She didn’t get it. And later when the images I would see in the North Wing became clearer, I kept that to myself.
    I stood up. “Nope. There is no sense in making love work. It either does or it doesn’t. Two beats, or not two beats. It’s one of the few things in life that are black and white.”
    “Two beats. That is your thing, not theirs,” she said so quietly that I could swear her tone was laced with jealousy. “You dodged the one guy that could have pulled you out of this grief you are fighting, for fear of what? You can’t possibly enjoy living life looking back. Like I said, you might need time alone. You dreamed of the death of everyone you hold close; that is the end of something, which means the birth of something better is coming.”
    Coded conversation. She was pushing me to put distance between myself and Gavin, and I didn’t even care to know why; I was ending this banter.
    Truth be told, she had commitment issues, too, but her exes didn’t set up camp in her life. Most of the time, they never spoke to her again. Not sure whose fault that was—I never pried into her life, and for the most part she did the same for me.
    I briskly walked past her.
    “Where are you going?”
    “Darkroom.”
    “It’s late.”
    “I’m wide awake.”
    Our room might as well have been an apartment. It was almost two thousand square feet, and it was supposed to be a study or some such thing, but we transformed it into something of our own. After we lost our family, neither of us could find the courage to sleep in separate rooms in this massive manor that was well over forty thousand square feet. Parts of the manor were over two hundred years old; others were newer. One wing was basically brand new, built ten years back by Mrs. Rasure—on my dime, I’m sure.
    My darkroom was behind a bookcase in our room, down a winding stone stairway.
    Photography has always held my interest, at least since that lady Megan gave me my birth mom’s camera. My only problem was that photography, if done correctly, captures emotions, and I can’t feel emotions because if I do—I freeze everything. I ruin the images.
    Though I’d found several cameras that could withstand my touch, I hated the barrier I had, I hated that I needed help to bring the images to life the old fashioned way. I just wanted to feel something, someone, and not fear destroying it. I think that’s why theater was my second strongest interest. On the stage, you could be anyone for a moment, completely check out and become someone else. And when you became that person, you understood them and inevitably saw life differently from that point on. According to the guys, I was always on stage. The consummate actress.
    They’d quickly figured out that the real Indie was deep inside, that when I was around them I became the girl they dreamed about—and when they acted on that, I couldn’t bear the lie anymore; I walked away in silence. They always followed, vowing to be my friend instead. At one time, I feared they were just waiting on the second act, waiting to see if the heroine would finally tell the hero who she was.
    I had a few tables in here that held everything I needed to develop film, the old-fashioned way. Strings were crisscrossed throughout the room, holding the images I was working on.
    On my desk was the camera that lady Megan had given me on that fateful day. I had never tried