Shaking her head, she returned to the frame of her camera, her smile feeling sarcastic. Her gang of best friends would agree that an Isabel Cantelli norm wasn’t anywhere near most people’s norm. She could almost hear her gang chastising her. Meredith would shrug and say the Isabel norm usually worked for her—it had certainly made her successful. Robin would shake her head and say Isabel needed to find a full-time man, not just a string of attractive lovers. Kim would dissect Isabel’s psyche and eventually agree with Robin that more permanence in her life would help ground her, and Teresa would chime in that whatever made Isabel happy was what she should go for.
Until a month ago and that trip to Afghanistan, Isabel would have laughed, rolled her eyes, poured herself more champagne and said her nomadic life, free of entangling man strings, was exactly what made her happy.
Then Curtis Johnson had happened to her, and Isabel’s view of the world had changed, and in this new, tainted viewpoint she’d realized that she’d been fooling herself for quite a while. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been searching for herself for quite a while, because somewhere in the middle of her successful career and her group of intelligent, articulate friends and her life that was at once exciting and comfortable, she’d lost herself.
Which is why she was here, on Oklahoma’s Tallgrass Prairie. She was doing the only thing she knew to reground herself—she was viewing life through her camera and searching for her true north again so she could find a way to navigate through the changing landscape of her life. Her plan had seemed to be working, until she’d allowed her mind to wander and her eyes to see the past. And the past had good and bad memories, times of joy and ridiculous fear. If there was an emotion she’d ever not experienced, she wasn’t sure what it would be. She needed something to shock her into enjoyment again. If she could only figure out what it would be. But this, this natural Oklahoma beauty was working right now.