CHAPTER 77
"You're late."
Those were the first words out of Caro Reyes' mouth.
I hadn't even reached all the way onto the floor of the newsroom yet. My boots creaked quietly on the waxed tile as I came to a half-step, half-enjoying speculating whether I'd heard it.
"I'm actually five minutes early," I said, holding up my phone like a shield.
Caro didn’t even glance at it. She just lifted an eyebrow that probably scared Pulitzer winners into submission and motioned for me to follow. “Then you’re five minutes late to learning that early is on time here. Move, Lanka.”
I moved.
The Queens Arrows newsroom was not a floor—it was a pulse. Radiating desks like veins, cords knotted like nerves, monitors blinking with headlines and anarchy and lives hung suspended mid-shatter. Windows ran floor to ceiling, pouring in hard, critical light. Every keystroke felt like it might change something in the world.
This was where my father used to fit.
And now—so did I.
Caro settled in among a cluster of desks against the photo wall—a collection of both legendary sorrow and unvarnished joy. I spotted one of my all-time favorites among them. It spoke to the depths of me: a boy holding a bloodied fiddle in the rubble of a bombing. No headlines were needed. It howled like one.
\### That one, I gasped involuntarily.
Caro shot another look over her shoulder. "My photo. Damascus, 2014."
I shut my eyes. "You stole that?"
She did not smile. "And I almost lost a lung doing it. What do you know about nearly-death missions, Lanka?"
I met her eyes. "I know my father never came back from one."
Her expression did not change. But something in her eyes did. She nodded, once, as if she'd been hoping I'd deflect—and I didn't.
"Show me what you have," she said, tilting her chin toward the broad worktable against the wall of faces.
I pulled out my small leather portfolio from my satchel and placed it on the table. My fingers quivered, just a bit. Not with fear, exactly—more with awe.
She opened it with neat fingers. Her eyes glinted briefly—trained, merciless. I couldn't see her face.
Until she stopped on the picture of Tony in the darkroom. The one I hadn't even thought about showing.
"You shoot like someone who's bled," she said.
My throat tightened.
"I like that," she continued, then closed the book. "But now I want to see what you do when you heal."
That broke me open.
She scribbled something on a pad of paper and ripped it off, smacking it into my palm. "First assignment. You've got three days."
I looked at the scrap of paper. Street narrative: 'What does survival look like?'
"Survival," I echoed. "That's kind of open-ended."
"That's life," she said. "You want to work here after this internship is over? Don't give me agony. Give me what's next."
\---
I went out onto the streets like I was on fire.
The city was a jungle of movement, steel, and strain. Horns barked out, crosswalks flashed, and every corner vibrated to somebody else's sound. But below the compounds of adrenaline was something tougher—truer. And it was my job to find it.
I started in Chinatown. A street cart vendor selling dumplings was laughing with a raincoat-clad boy. Chocolate smeared on his nose, an origami crane in his pocket. Click.
And then SoHo. A mural artist on the walls of alleys stopped midway with the brush to gently cradle a pigeon with a broken wing. He was scared. Tender. Click.
By sunset, I’d climbed halfway up the Williamsburg Bridge to shoot the city’s bones against a bleeding sky. The skyline cut the clouds like teeth, but beneath it, people still held hands. Still moved forward.
My lens didn’t lie—and it didn’t flinch.
I breathed in at the bridge's peak, the wind tugging at my hair, the camera hitting my chest like a heartbeat. I felt the heaviness of all that I'd shot today. Not just in my arms, but in my ribs. In the place that once thought the only stories that mattered were the ones that scarred in harm.
Survival was louder than scars.
And. Ssshhht, quieter than grief.
It was. Sneaky, stubborn, and stunning.
Absolutely. And I was getting to know it.
\---
Tony phoned back that evening.
I sat cross-legged on the floor of my short-term studio apartment, amidst camera batteries, open boxes of granola, and a chaos of lens caps.
"How's day one?" he inquired.
"Caro Reyes slapped me with her words in the soul."
"That's a yes, then?".
I laughed. "She's a firecracker. But I think I might've got her to blink once."
"Legend," he declared, voice low and inflated.
There was a silence.
"How about you?" I asked. "How is life back in the States?"
"Quieter," he said. "Thatch's name popped up in some campus committee report. Wells is ghosted. Legacy's falling apart quicker than they can rebrand."
I let the silence land, because at times silence was the same as understanding. And Tony had walked away from all that—for real. For good.
"I miss you," he said then, plain.
"I know," I answered, my voice cracking. "I miss you, too."
We did not say I love you. Not yet. Maybe never in that sense. But we said what mattered.
As soon as we hung up, I pulled out the photo journal he'd left for me. Blank pages. Unlimited options.
I wrote on the first one: Day One — Survival is a story still being told.
I sketched out a rough map of the photos I'd include—each photograph captioned, each strand linked.
A dumpling cart. A bird with a broken wing. A boy laughing in a rainstorm.
My city. My story.
Mine.
\---
Three days after that, I went back to the newsroom—fifteen minutes before time.
Caro didn't mutter "you're early." She just extended her hand. "Show me."
I handed her a print roll. I watched her unroll it, her eyes racing over each frame, her jaw tightening once.
"You don't shoot survival," she said finally. "You live it."
I swallowed hard. "Is that. good?
She looked up, something flashing behind her irises. "That's the only thing worth shooting, Lanka."
And then, for the first time since we've met, she smiled.
Just barely.
But it was enough.