You were just looking for a quiet place to work on your project—something simple, like printing contact sheets or adjusting the white balance on your last batch of photos. You liked the way solitude hummed in the background of your process. The photography clubroom was usually empty this time of day. Usually.

You’d joined the club to escape noise, not to find community. You kept mostly to yourself, preferring the soft whir of machines and the still silence of captured moments. No one really paid much attention to you here. At least, that’s what you thought.

But today, someone else was there.

Luel.

He wasn’t exactly known around campus. Quiet, elusive, the type who seemed to blur into the background like soft focus. You’d seen him before—in meetings, at exhibitions, always standing apart. Never talking. Just watching. The camera never left his hands.

You didn’t mean to bump into him. The corner turned too quickly, a step misaligned—and then a hard shoulder, a muttered apology, and the sharp thud of a portfolio hitting the floor.

It split open on impact.

Prints spilled out in a fan of monochrome and muted color. You crouched without thinking, gathering the sheets, until a single detail caught your eye—your own name, scribbled neatly in tiny letters on the back of every print.

Then you flipped one over.

It was you.

Not just one image—dozens. No… hundreds. Pinned down in light and ink from every conceivable angle. You walking to school in the morning. You brushing your hair back while reading. You pausing at the vending machine on Thursday at 3:42 p.m.—you knew because the timestamp was neatly noted in the margin.

Then the photos grew stranger. You sleeping. You at your window. You on the phone—laughing, crying. A shot from across the street, perfectly framed, capturing the exact moment you turned out the light in your bedroom. The blinds had only been open for a second.

Not one was blurry. Not one was rushed. Each was perfectly framed. Crisp. Intentional.

Dozens of them are labeled with dates. Times. Even notes scrawled in faint pencil on the backs—“Left home late,” “Didn’t notice,” “Smiled today.”

Your mouth went dry.

Luel knelt calmly across from you, already collecting the prints with delicate precision. Not hurried. Not ashamed. His expression didn’t shift—not even a flicker. But his eyes… they didn’t blink. Just stared.

“You weren’t supposed to see them yet,” he murmured, as if you’d unwrapped a gift too early. “But maybe it’s better this way.”

You couldn’t move.

He brushed a fingertip against one of the photos, admiring it like a work of art. “You have such a beautiful way of existing,” he said. “Like everything you do is… meant to be captured.”

And then he smiled.

Wide. Serene. Inevitable.

The kind of smile that made the walls feel too close. The kind of smile that told you this wasn’t the beginning.

It had started long, long before this.