‘I was a photographer in London,’ she began quietly. ‘For quite a few years. I loved my job. I worked in a studio for a while, mostly photographing families or being hired for corporate events or portrait photography – that kind of thing. No two days were ever the same and I liked that. But then I was sent to a fashion shoot and my life changed for ever.’ Orla paused and Luke waited as she took another sip of her wine.
‘I’d never done a fashion shoot before. My partner usually covered them. It’s a different kind of atmosphere and it never really appealed to me, but my partner was ill so I stepped in. It was for some high-end magazine. Some of those silly clothes that nobody ever wears in real life. You know the sort – lots of net and trains and feathers and things.’ Orla shook her head as she remembered. ‘But I wasn’t there to judge. Anyway, there was this model. She was beautiful – the loveliest hair and eyes I’d ever seen – but she was a real diva and she was fighting with the director all the time. They just weren’t seeing eye to eye. I was doing my best to stay in the background and was counting down the minutes until I could leave. But I never got to leave, because the model did.’
‘But how did you shoot without the model?’
Orla gave a wry smile as she replayed what had happened in her mind. ‘Because I became the model.’
‘What?’
‘The director was frantic. He had to get the shoot finished and he was looking around the room for someone to step in and picked me. I really don’t know why. I’d never modelled in my life but, before I knew it, I was having my hair and make-up done and I was on set, only, this time, I was in front of the camera.’
Orla remembered the chaos of the day once again and how every fibre of her being had screamed against it, knowing that the role of model simply wasn’t her. But she hadn’t protested loudly enough, had she? If she had, her whole life would have been different.
‘But who took the photos?’ Luke asked.
‘The director did. He used to be a photographer and he knew how to handle a camera.’ Orla took a deep breath. ‘So, the photographs came out and the shoot was deemed a huge success by the magazine. I even got fan mail, can you believe it? The editor of the magazine was thrilled and asked for me again. Well, I said no, of course. I was a photographer, not a model. But they made me an offer. It was ridiculous really. More than I made in a year as a photographer. What could I say? I had bills to pay on an expensive London flat.’
‘So you said yes?’
She nodded. ‘Anyway, I got quite a bit of work after that and, one day, I found myself working with the model who I’d replaced that day. Her name was Kelli and she’d seen the photos and congratulated me, but I couldn’t help worrying that she might be mad at me for having got her job and all the subsequent jobs that came my way. But she was always polite to me and I didn’t worry about it because I had other things to worry about.’
She paused again, looking into the fire as she finished her wine and stood up to find another bottle and pour herself a glass. She motioned to Luke.
‘No, I’m good,’ he said. His glass was still half full. ‘So what happened next?’
She sat back down next to him, took another sip of wine, wishing with all her heart that she could rewind time and make different choices.
‘I started getting a lot more fan mail,’ she went on. ‘Bags of the stuff. Silly, really, because I certainly wasn’t the youngest or prettiest model around. Some of it was lovely, but some of it was really disturbing. I had to stop reading it after a while. I couldn’t cope. I had to hire somebody to deal with it all and they were the ones who spotted the letters from . . .’ She paused.
‘Who?’ Luke asked gently.
‘Brandon.’
Orla swallowed hard after saying the name aloud and she felt Luke watching her as she drank her wine.
‘You okay?’
She nodded and wondered if she could go on. She didn’t have to, she knew that. She didn’t really owe Luke an explanation, yet she had promised him one and so she continued.
‘He started with the odd letter via my agent. The odd odd letter. I’m told it’s usual in the business to receive marriage proposals and personal questions from strangers, but it felt so weird. Just a few months before, I’d been an unknown photographer, hiding behind the camera, and now, all of a sudden, I seemed to belong to the public. I hated it. Then the letters became more frequent. My agent told me to stop reading them and started keeping a separate file of them. I told Kelli about them and she said she got letters like that all the time. Emails, too, and tweets. She told me to ignore them, and I did, but then he showed up.’
‘Oh, my God! Where did he show up?’
‘At one of my modelling assignments.’
‘How did he know where you’d be?’
Orla shrugged, feeling again the cold terror she had felt at the time. ‘How do these types of people find anyone? Because they want to! Anyway, he started showing up wherever I went, calling out to me. “Orla! Did you get my letters? Why haven’t you written back to me?”
