My First Love

Chapter 27: What It Costs

Professor Webb said something in the third session of Prisca's documentary seminar that she brought home and could not stop thinking about.

She told me about it Friday evening, seated cross-legged on my floor with her tea going cold beside her, the way she got when something had taken up genuine residence in her thinking.

"He said the question is never *what do you want to show,*" she said. "The question is always *what are you willing to see.*" She paused. "Because showing requires seeing first. And seeing — actually seeing, not just looking — costs something."

I thought about Gloria at her kitchen table. Raymond looking at the mirror.

"Seeing requires you to be changed by what you find," I said.

"Exactly." She looked at me. "Webb said most filmmakers — most researchers, most journalists, most anyone trying to tell someone else's story — stop at looking. They collect what confirms what they already thought and call it seeing."

"The difference being?"

"Looking keeps you separate," she said. "Seeing lets it in."

---

The Cleary Hill project was letting things in.

I had gone back twice more since Gloria's kitchen table — once to a neighborhood association meeting that Raymond had mentioned, held in the back room of a Caribbean restaurant on Morrison Street on a Wednesday evening, and once to simply walk and be present in the way Prisca had originally suggested.

The neighborhood association meeting had been twelve people — a mix of ages, a mix of how long they had each been in Cleary Hill, a common thread of investment in a place they had chosen and were refusing to abandon to the forces that were slowly rearranging it.

The discussion had been practical and concrete — a proposal to convert the vacant lot into a temporary community garden while the longer fight for a permanent replacement facility continued, a report on the city council engagement, a fundraising update.

But underneath the practicality was something else. A quality of people who had been let down by a system they had trusted and had decided, without fanfare, to keep going anyway.

I had sat in the corner and listened and written and felt, increasingly, that I was inside something real.

---

I told Prisca about the meeting Saturday morning over coffee at her apartment.

She listened with the focused attention that meant she was genuinely engaged rather than just present.

"Twelve people," she said. "On a Wednesday evening in January."

"Yes."

"That's not nothing," she said. "January Wednesday evenings are when people who don't really care stop showing up."

"That's what I thought."

She was quiet for a moment. "Are you going to keep attending?"

"As long as they'll have me." I paused. "I asked Raymond if it would be acceptable. He said yes but that I would need to make myself useful eventually. That observers who only observe wear out their welcome."

Prisca smiled. "He's right."

"I know." I looked at my notes. "I offered to help draft the proposal for the community garden. Raymond said he would mention it to the group."

She looked at me steadily. "You crossed the edge," she said.

It took me a moment to understand what she meant.

Ellis's feedback. *Stopped one step early.* The observer who becomes a participant. The researcher who lets the work cost something.

"Yes," I said. "I think I did."

---

The Voss project had entered its first active phase.

Prisca had spent two weeks with the project brief, familiarizing herself with the three subjects — Jerome the painter, Clara the cellist, Thomas the novelist — through their existing work, interviews, and whatever documentation Voss's production company had already assembled.

The first filming trip was scheduled for the following weekend. Brooklyn. Jerome's studio.

She was preparing the way she prepared for everything — thoroughly and without panic. But there was something underneath the preparation that was different from her usual composure. A quality of genuine anticipation, the specific kind that arrives when something you have been working toward for a long time finally becomes immediate.

"Are you nervous?" I asked Thursday evening.

"Yes," she said. Without hesitation.

"Good nervous or difficult nervous?"

She thought about it. "The kind that means I understand what's at stake," she said. "Jerome is fifty-three years old and he is letting a camera into the most uncertain and exposed moment of his professional life. He is trusting Voss and by extension trusting me." She paused. "I don't take that lightly."

"You won't," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because you just described his experience before you described your own," I said. "That's the whole answer."

She looked at me for a moment.

Then she nodded. The small, slow nod.

---

Friday Dora organized dinner.

This was Dora's periodic practice — assembling the group with the cheerful authority of someone who had decided that regular collective meals were important and that the group's various schedules were an obstacle to be managed rather than respected.

She booked a table at a Thai place on Tremont Street — the same one where Prisca and Abdullahi had met properly — and sent a message to the group chat she had created without asking anyone's permission in early January.

*Friday. Seven PM. Tremont Thai. Attendance mandatory. Dora.*

Peter had replied: *'Mandatory' is doing a lot of work in that sentence.*

Dora had replied: *As it should.*

Abdullahi had replied: *I will be there.*

Sophie was coming. This was now a natural thing — Sophie at group dinners, Sophie in the group chat, Sophie asking questions that nobody else thought to ask and listening to the answers with the focused intelligence that Peter had described as equally interesting and argumentative.

---

Dinner was loud and warm and exactly what a Friday in January needed to be.

The conversation moved in the way it moved when all of them were together — quick, layered, jumping between subjects with Dora's connective energy driving the pace.

Sophie and Prisca had found each other properly in recent weeks — two front-row people recognizing a shared frequency — and they were deep in a conversation about the ethics of documentary representation that had started before the food arrived and continued through it.

Peter watched Sophie argue a point with Prisca and had the expression of a man watching something he was proud of without having any right to be proud of it.

I leaned over. "You look like a parent at a school play."

"I feel like a parent at a school play," he said. "Is that strange?"

"A little."

"She's extraordinary," he said quietly. Not for the table — just for me. "Every time I think I have the measure of her she does something that moves the measure."

"Is that comfortable?"

He thought about it honestly. "No," he said. "It's better than comfortable."

---

Abdullahi was quieter than usual.

Not troubled — just interior, which was different for him. His interior was usually expressed as precision and engagement. Tonight he was present but slightly elsewhere.

After the food I asked him directly.

"The symposium paper," he said. "I've been revising."

"Is it going well?"

"The argument is sound," he said. "I am less certain about the presentation of it." He paused. "Knowing something clearly and communicating it clearly are related but not identical skills."

"What's the paper arguing?"

"That community economic development initiatives fail at a predictable rate not because of funding inadequacy but because of structural misalignment between institutional goals and community-defined needs." He paused. "The Meridian, incidentally, is a precise example of what I'm describing."

I stared at him. "You've been researching the same neighborhood."

"Not specifically. But the pattern is the same." He looked at me. "We should talk about this properly."

"Yes," I said. "We should."

---

Walking home after dinner Prisca and I moved through the cold January streets in the easy silence of people who had had enough conversation for one evening and were comfortable with the quiet that followed it.

At some point she took my hand.

We walked like that for a while without talking.

The city was doing its late Friday thing — restaurants still lit, occasional groups on the sidewalk, the particular energy of a city that had made it to the weekend.

"Webb's question," I said eventually.

"Mm."

"*What are you willing to see.*"

She looked over at me.

"Gloria," I said. "Raymond. The twelve people on a Wednesday evening." I paused. "It's costing something. The way he said it should."

"Yes," she said quietly. "That means you're doing it right."

"Does it get easier?"

She thought about it honestly.

"No," she said. "But you get more willing."

---

We stopped at the corner of her street.

The January night was clear and very cold, the stars visible above the city lights, Boston spread and lit around us.

She turned to face me.

"Jerome tomorrow," she said.

"Jerome tomorrow," I confirmed. "You're ready."

She looked at me for a moment.

"Come back to Boston the same person you left as," I said. "Just with more of what you went to find."

She smiled — the full one.

"That," she said, "is the most Daniel Reeves thing you have ever said."

"Is that good?"

"It's exactly right," she said.

She kissed me in the cold January night and then turned and walked up her street.

I stood at the corner for a moment.

The city around me.

Everything moving.

Everything exactly as it should be.