Sunday morning arrived with a clear, piercing frost that made the air taste like iron and ice. By seven-thirty, Liam’s vintage pickup truck was rumbling quietly down the access road toward the riverbank, its heater blowing warm air over Ava’s boots.
Beside her in the middle seat, her camera bag sat packed with high-speed black-and-white film and wide-angle lenses—a direct departure from the tight macro lenses she used to keep locked in Studio 3B.
Liam pulled the truck onto a bed of crushed gravel near the perimeter fence of the decommissioned suspension bridge. The massive structure stretched across the river, its steel trusses rising like intricate geometric webbing against the pale horizon. The sun had just cleared the treeline, casting long, sharp beams of golden light straight thro
