Elaine explained how her routine mammogram had detected a small mass. It had been biopsied and she’d gotten the diagnosis. She paused as Wilma returned with their lunches.

“Eat up,” the older woman instructed before leaving.

Maya stared at her sandwich and knew she would have to take it home.

“We have to eat,” Elaine told her. “Not only because Wilma will yell at us if we don’t, but because not eating won’t help me. We’re both going to need our strength.”

“Okay.” Maya reluctantly took a bite. “So what’s the treatment plan?”

“A lumpectomy followed by six weeks of radiation.”

“You have to tell them,” Maya said quietly. “They need to know.”

“They don’t. Maya, I appreciate what you’re saying, but this is my decision. I’m going to get through this, then I’ll deal with my family.” Her dark eyes narrowed. “You gave me your word.”

“I know, and I’ll keep it.” Even though she knew her friend was wrong. Ceallach and her sons would want to know. They would want to be there for her.

“I’ve rented a studio apartment in the same building as Morgan’s Bookstore,” Elaine told her. “A place to go rest after my radiation. I’ve heard the treatment can make me tired. I can get myself back and forth to the clinic or whatever it’s called for that, but I will need help after the lumpectomy.”

Maya forced herself to chew the bite she’d taken, but the sandwich had no flavor and she knew she wouldn’t be able to get down much more.

“Of course. What can I do?”

“Drive me there, then bring me back to your place. I’d like to stay the night.”

Because she would have had surgery, Maya thought. “Can you schedule for a Friday morning? We can say we’re having a girls’ weekend. You won’t have to go home until Sunday. By then you should be feeling better.”

Elaine gave her a grateful smile. “Thank you. They said the lumpectomy shouldn’t take long.”

“However long it takes, I’ll be there.”

Maya was more than happy to take care of her friend, but she now regretted the promise to keep the secret. Elaine was making a mistake. But as of now, it didn’t seem as if she could be talked out of it.

CHAPTER FIVE

DEL STUDIED THE screen in front of him. “You were right,” he said flatly. “The sunrise doesn’t work at all.”

Maya barely glanced up. “There’s too much light and it’s in the wrong place. It was impossible to make the shot and keep you in the center. So it feels off.”

He saw she had identified the problem. While he hadn’t been able to define what was wrong, he’d sensed it. Now he was able to see how he wasn’t in the middle of the screen. Although he was supposed to be the focus, he was off to the side, with the sun making a glaring appearance.

He waited a second, then said, “Are you going to say ‘I told you so’?”

She continued to stare at the monitor in front of her. “You said it for me.” She finally looked at him. “It’s okay, Del. I do this for a living. The show I worked on was small enough that I had to handle more than just producing the segments. I edited, I wrote copy and sometimes I worked the camera.”

“Meaning I should shut up and keep out of your way?”

“No.” She gave him a faint smile. “Meaning there’s more to producing good material than simply pointing a camera and pushing a button. Look at this.”

She typed on the keyboard and brought up more of his footage, then started it running. There wasn’t any sound, but he remembered the shot. It was taken up by the wind turbines.

He was walking through the frame, pointing and talking. Everything was in focus, but he knew instinctively something was off.

“It’s the eye line,” she told him, using her pen to point at the screen. “As a rule, the screen in divided into thirds, horizontally. The subject’s eye should be even with this line.” She drew an imaginary line across the screen. “You’re too low in the shot. There’s nothing in the eye line. Not you, not the wind turbines.”

She typed again and brought up her footage of the same scene. The camera focused on him and this time his face was right where she said it should be. As he watched, the camera panned, bringing the wind turbines into view. Then the center of the blades was in the eye line.

“Just like that,” he said and shook his head.

“There’s some other stuff,” she told him. “You changed the camera settings at the same scene. You shot half your material in SD and half in HD. While we can bring HD down to SD, there’s no way to take it up. Because some of this material may become a TV commercial, we have to shoot in HD. It would be different if we were just going to put it on a website.”

High definition instead of standard definition, he thought, remembering that he’d wanted to confirm the settings, but must have changed them instead.

“Why didn’t you say something?” he asked.

She turned to him. They were sitting close. Close enough for him to be aware of the curve of her cheek and the shape of her mouth. Dark lashes framed big, green eyes.

Need started slowly, almost in the background. It was more of a whisper, a hint, one that grew over time. He thought about how her skin would feel against his fingers if he touched her. Of the way her lips fit against his. If he took her in his arms, would she be as he remembered, or were there changes?