This is not a love story by Salena Casha

If Daphne hadn’t scrolled through reels on fashion photography, she would have never found Foto D’Amore Studio or booked a flight to Athens. Or bought Lars a custom cerulean suit- jacket with sunburst medallions on the lapel. Or found herself in a half-empty apartment in Bushwick eight weeks later.

But it couldn’t be helped. Not when Foto D’Amore’s site claimed they could expose the true story behind the film and Daphne wanted her friends to see it: wet sand touching them through a photo frame while they drank wine from TJ’s together.

Be warned, you will see something you hadn’t noticed before, the contract said. But it might just set you free.

Daphne knew a sell when she saw one. Hell, she gotten fortune five hundred companies to put in budget lines for water filtration systems with fancy settings like grapefruit fizz, but this was her vacation. The only one she and Lars had taken in the three years they’d been together.

So she booked two sessions for them, watched the money convert its way out of her bank account from dollars to euros and got straight to work on their wardrobe. Lars was as involved as he always was in her grand plans, which really meant she could do as she pleased and he’d follow her. She had come to him with her plans for Greece and Foto D’Amore and he pulled her to his chest and rested his chin on the top of her head and said, I’d go to the end of the Earth for you but yeah, I’ll settle for Greece.

She loved the way he spoke into her hair like the strands could hear it. He held her like this when they watched Ted Lasso or The Last of Us, when they talked about the most recent James Patterson they’d read. His heart was always a steady sixty-three beats per minute and she’d count them when she pressed against his chest bone.

It’s not settling, she told him.

Of course, he said.

She forgot he didn’t like seafood until they got there, but that couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t her fault that he was hesitant to try new things, that, maybe, he had a shellfish allergy. He was from the midwest and far from the sea and didn’t trust fish, but she didn’t need to suffer, did she?

The seven days flew by and while Daphne couldn’t remember specifics, she felt the walkways in her sprained ankle and she did recall, vaguely, the cliffed and stacked houses of Santorini, but she wasn’t entirely sure if it was from her memory or photos she’d seen on the internet. A tour guide there briefly mentioned that the iconic blue and white paint came from a law established by a military junta in an attempt to enforce patriotism across the Isle in 1967. Less romantic that she would have liked, though, what was more romantic than war? Love rekindled after?

A week later, she was in the middle of a hard sell, telling some HR rep that a custom flavored water machine was exactly what General Motors needed when the haptics gently buzzed on her watch. She glanced briefly at her wrist.

Your Foto D’Amore Album Link is enclosed, it said.

“So two machines,” she said to the General Motors.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know if we’re ready yet to—” the rep replied.

“There’s a trial period of ninety days. What do you have to lose?” Daphne replied. She could feel her phone pulsing with the photos, but tried to keep her cool. “We can have them delivered in three weeks.”

“Ok, I’ll just need to—”

“Fantastic, I’ll send the paperwork over by the end of the day,” Daphne said. She gave the woman a quick wave before ending the Teams’ call.

She took a deep breath, unlocked her phone, and tapped into the link. Briefly forgot how to breathe.

The album showed a luminous adventure through Grecian ruins. A woman who didn’t know her own beauty. Even though Lars looked handsome in his custom suit and Givenchy loafers, he was more Greek statue than Hercules. A part of the background. A supporting character, an admirer.

But not her.

She was breathtaking. Her legs were both lean and muscled as they arched in six inch stilettos on rock as old as the Earth itself. The sun lit her hair in balayage against her neck. Her dress feathered out around her in a wash of jade and ebony. She looked more water nymph than human in a shot they’d taken on the beach, her fingers reaching out to touch the glassed surface, her hair swept across her right shoulder. Her reflection in the water was even more dazzling in its symmetry. It’s agelessness.

I didn’t realize, Daphne thought, savoring each photo before swiping on to the next, how beautiful I am.

She remembered the boy in high school who told her she only looked passable when she wore low cut tops. How her swim coach once advised her against an open mouthed smile because she had small teeth. Everything she’d ever thought about herself: her torso being too square, her nose not straight enough, her eyes slightly too far apart seemed like a critique about an entirely different person.

With the phone cradled in her hand, she burst into tears.

“Whoever you are,” she whispered. “I love you.”

When she showed the album to Lars later, he didn’t seem to notice what she had.

“You’ve always looked like this to me,” he told her.

He hadn’t meant it to hurt her, in fact, he’d really meant it in the opposite. How amazing it must have been to see her in that light every day. But it irked her. He couldn’t really see it, didn’t understand what she meant. So during the new season of Ted Lasso, instead of staying curled against his chest, she sat in the far corner of their couch and swiped back through the photos over and over.

“It’s like the epitome of self care. You just have to do it to see for yourself,” she tried to explain to her friend, Tiffany, when they met up for brunch that weekend. The phone was in her hand, a death grip, and she moved it across the table. “You can scroll through it if you like.”

“Just show me your favorites,” Tiffany said.

“We can just go through the whole thing. It’ll only take a second.”

Instead they scrolled for the rest of brunch, her pancakes getting cold. Afterwards, Tiffany called Lars.

“Something’s going on with Daff. I don’t know what, but she’s spinning on this album for some reason. I normally would say it’s good, but now it feels like,” she paused and looked over her shoulder back at where Daphne had crossed to her car. “Something else,” she finished.

Everyone knew. Everyone except Daphne, but it was already too late. Her instagram turned into an endless stream of photographs from the album and then, when those had run their course, she returned to Foto D’Amore, this time having them meet her in New York, for a solo shoot.

This time though, after she returned, she noticed that her reflection was far different than the one she’d come to know and love, the one she spent hours pouring over before she went to bed. Every time she passed her gaze across a store window as she walked down her block, it broke her heart. So she covered up all the mirrors in her house.

Lars took her aside.

“This isn’t good for you,” he said. “You’ve stopped eating. You’re on your phone any chance you get. You don’t even look at me anymore.”

The bile that rose in her throat when he said the words shocked even Daphne.

“I’ve seen the truth and I’m not sorry if it’s not what you wanted,” she said as she pushed him away and curled up on the couch again, alone, phone in hand. A week later, he removed his guitar and his king-sized mattress and his TV from the apartment they shared and moved in with a craigslister across the city.

All he’d been was background, she reminded herself. He didn’t know what it’s like, discovering herself after so long. She couldn’t unsee it: the edges of her cream halter dress. Her poreless face in the film. You’re beautiful, she whispered to the photo of herself in a silk lilac dress, the edges darkened from wet sand. The empty rooms echoed with her words. Don’t ever forget how much I love you.

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