Chapter 1 - The Booking
Chapter 1 - The Booking
The email came in at 11:42pm.
Jem only noticed it because she was still awake, half-sprawled across her sofa with her laptop balanced on her knees, culling through a wedding gallery she had shot the weekend before. The glow from the screen lit the room in soft blues, her camera bag abandoned by the door like it had simply given up following her any further that day.
She clicked through images automatically. Adjust. Flag. Reject. Keep.
A laugh caught mid-air. A veil thrown sideways by the wind. A hand gripping another just a little tighter than necessary.
Those were always her favourite moments. Not the perfectly posed portraits or the carefully styled details, although she loved those too when they were done well. It was the bits people didn’t realise they had given away. The honesty. The reactions that slipped through before anyone had time to make themselves look polished. A father blinking too fast during speeches. A bride looking down at her ring when everyone else was watching the dance floor. A groom’s shoulders dropping the second the pressure of the day finally lifted.
Jem had built an entire career around noticing what other people missed.
It suited her more than she liked to admit.
Being a photographer meant she could be inside a room without ever truly being part of it. Close enough to witness everything. Far enough away that no one asked too many questions about her own life. People invited her into the most intimate days of theirs, let her move through grief and joy and chaos with a camera in her hands, and somehow that camera made her both visible and invisible at the same time.
She gave people proof that love had happened.
Then she went home alone and edited it.
Her inbox pinged.
She almost ignored it.
Almost.
But habit, instinct and the small, inconvenient part of her that was always curious made her glance down at the notification instead.
Subject: Full Week Wedding Coverage — Silverbirch Isle Manor
Jem paused.
That name alone was enough to pull her fully upright.
“Silverbirch Isle,” she murmured under her breath, already clicking it open.
She knew that venue. Knew it better than most. A private manor house set on its own island in the middle of a sprawling lake, tucked away in the North West like it had no interest in being found unless you already knew where to look. Ivy-covered walls that had long since stopped pretending they weren’t in control, silver birch trees thick around the grounds, and water on all sides that turned glass-smooth at sunset when the weather behaved.
It was one of those places that didn’t need dressing up.
It already had presence.
The owners had been slowly restoring it over the years, careful not to polish away the parts that gave it character, and Jem had been lucky enough to start photographing weddings there early on. Since then, the venue had recommended her whenever couples wanted someone who knew the island properly, someone who understood the light, the weather, the weird little timings of a place that could feel soft and romantic one minute and wildly dramatic the next.
It had become, in a strange self-employed sort of way, a home from home.
That was rare. When you worked for yourself, you didn’t often get the feeling of going to work in the traditional sense. No familiar desk. No shared kettle. No regular faces you passed on a Monday morning. Most of her job was movement: new venues, new couples, new families, new timelines, new emotional disasters dressed up in pastel florals. But Silverbirch gave her something close to routine. Familiar staff. Familiar paths. Familiar windows. A place that felt exclusive without losing intimacy, elegant without becoming sterile.
She had been photographing weddings there for nearly five years now, enough to know exactly where the light hit the west terrace at golden hour, which window caught the morning mist just right, and where to stand if a couple wanted the manor behind them without making it look like the building had eaten them whole.
If the weather behaved, you could capture something there that didn’t feel staged.
It felt real.
Her eyes scanned the email.
Destination wedding.
Week-long celebration.
Full event coverage requested.
Jem let out a low whistle.
“Well,” she muttered, dragging a hand through her hair, “someone’s going all in.”
She kept reading.
English bride. American groom. Guests arriving from overseas. Multiple events across several days. Pre-wedding gatherings. Communal meals. Cultural ceremonies. Final wedding day coverage.
Her brows lifted slightly.
It wasn’t unheard of, but it wasn’t standard either. Not here. Not like this. Usually, weddings at Silverbirch Isle were contained, elegant, intentional. A day, maybe two if the couple had serious budget and a love of making their guests emotionally and financially unavailable for an entire weekend.
This sounded like something else entirely.
Bigger.
More structured.
Like the wedding was not just an event, but a reason for people to gather.
Her gaze flicked to the bottom of the email.
Planner: Sophie Calder.
A smile pulled at her mouth before she could stop it.
“Of course it’s you,” Jem said softly.
Sophie was one of the few planners Jem genuinely liked working with. Efficient without being rigid. Creative without losing her head. The kind of person who understood that the best moments weren’t always the ones written into the schedule. Sophie allowed a wedding day to breathe, which was a quality Jem appreciated deeply, especially in an industry where some planners treated timelines like military campaigns with chair covers.
She also made a gorgeous cup of tea, which wasn’t technically a professional qualification but absolutely should have been.
If Sophie was running this, it meant two things.
One, this would be organised.
Two, it would still leave space for something unexpected.
Jem clicked on the attached brief.
It opened slowly, the document loading page after page of notes. Timeline outlines. Guest movements. Access requirements. Accommodation plans. Ferry schedules. Staff rotas. Several private events marked with very little detail.
And then a line that made her pause.
Full discretion requested. Certain private events are not to be documented unless explicitly approved on the day.
Jem frowned slightly.
That wasn’t unusual on its own. Some couples liked to keep parts of their celebration off-camera, especially now every wedding seemed to come with its own unofficial social media department made up of guests who couldn’t let a bride walk down the aisle without filming it vertically. She had photographed plenty of unplugged ceremonies. Plenty of private family traditions. Plenty of moments couples wanted remembered, but not shared.
But paired with everything else?
The scale. The duration. The wording. The oddly careful tone of the brief.
It sat differently.
She leaned back into the sofa and read the line again.
“Alright,” she murmured, tapping a finger lightly against the trackpad. “What’s the catch?”
Because there was always a catch.
Long hours, probably. Unpredictable schedules. High expectations. Guests with money and opinions. A groom’s side flying in from America with enough organisation around them to make Sophie sound unusually cautious in an email, which was saying something.
None of that bothered Jem.
That was the job.
Still, something about it didn’t feel like just another booking. She couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t pin it to anything specific in the email. There was no obvious red flag, no wildly impossible request, no bride asking whether Jem could edit everyone’s arms thinner by Monday.
Just a low, quiet hum of awareness sitting somewhere in her chest. The same feeling she got sometimes, right before a wedding day shifted away from the plan and became something better.
Or worse.
Jem huffed out a breath and shook her head slightly.
“You’re overthinking it,” she told herself.
She did that. Less than Sophie accused her of, but more than she admitted to anyone.
It was a good job. A great venue. A planner she trusted. And when she glanced back at the email, at the scale of the booking and the opportunity wrapped inside it, there was no version of her that was going to say no.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a second before she started typing.
Hi Sophie,
This sounds incredible, thank you so much for thinking of me. Silverbirch Isle is always a yes from me, and I’d love to hear more about what you have planned for the week.
I’m available for the dates you mentioned and happy to cover full event documentation. Let me know a good time to chat through details.
Jem
P.S. Will I need to bring us a fresh stash of chocolate biscuits and teabags for this wedding? Haha.
She read it once. Clean. Simple. Professional enough for business, with a sideline of cheek that Sophie would expect from years of working weddings together. And by the sound of this week, they were going to need to be on biscuit-and-caffeine-filled top form.
She hit send.
The email whooshed off into the void, decision made.
Jem closed her laptop with a soft click and let her head fall back against the sofa cushion, staring up at the ceiling as the room settled around her again. Quiet. Normal. Hers.
The half-edited wedding gallery waited.
The cooling mug of tea on the coffee table judged her silently.
Her camera bag still sat by the door like a tired dog.
Everything was exactly as it had been ten minutes ago.
And yet that faint, restless energy didn’t go away.
If anything, it lingered.
Pressed.
Like the beginning of something she couldn’t see yet.
