They say, ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’. The implications being that you can do whatever you want out there and none of it will follow you home. However, that isn’t always the case - as this story will tell you - and sometimes the consequences of your actions bring with a whole new load of problems. It can be said that all problems have a solution, much like every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, but for the protagonist of this story, things happened very differently. 

Six months before his twenty-eighth birthday and three weeks after his older sister had gotten married, Kris had his parents blowing up every one of his social media accounts and electronic devices asking when he was going to ‘find a nice woman and get married’, because he ‘wasn’t getting any younger’ and he had to ‘set an example’, whatever that meant. Blocking his parents on Facebook and ignoring their calls for the fifth consecutive day that week apparently wasn’t enough for them to get the message that Kris wanted to be left alone. Eventually, his remedy was to ‘accidentally’ drop his phone in the pool when tidying away the floats and rearranging the beanbags. He’d buy a new one when he went shopping on Monday, eleven o’clock sharp. 

Monday was two days away, and he knew that not having a phone for two days would cause problems with work, so he ventured into the study like he usually did every morning and took out the spare he had stored away in the top drawer of his desk. His clients knew that if he didn’t answer a text or call within ten minutes, to ring his other number instead. The number he referred to as his ‘safety’ number, though his best friend preferred to refer to it as his ‘my-parents-are-on-my--again’ number. 

After turning it on, he slipped the phone into his pocket and went to the kitchen to fix himself something to eat before he properly started the day. He had only one booking for the day, which was an hour car journey from his house. Little girls birthday parties were some of the more challenging bookings he received, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy them. Not to mention that parents paid a lot of money for him to photograph their children. 

Kris had gained quite a reputation for himself. He’d been interested in photography since he was in middle school, and after graduation, he’d taken it up professionally. Photographing everything from farm animals in drag to senior proms, he’d built up quite a portfolio, and the way his phone was constantly buzzing with calls, texts, and emails, it wasn’t hard to believe that he was the most popular photographer in California. 

Finishing off his breakfast, he washed his bowl and put it away - the third cupboard on the left, above the sink - and went to the spare bedroom. That was where he kept all of his camera equipment; different lenses were evenly spread across the bed in their separate cases, his cameras set out on the dresser by the door, and his multitude of props and lighting equipment stood neatly in the corner. Everything in his house had a place because that made it easier to find things, though apparently his housekeeper hadn’t quite got the message. There were only so many times he could change the toilet paper round to the correct direction before he went mad. 

Picking up the Canon camera on the end of the dresser, and the EF 85mm lens from the middle of the bed, he put them in his bag before picking up a few props from the corner. From his experience, children loved playing with anything that lit up, glowed, or was brightly coloured, and rich kids were no exception. Colourful flower crowns, several tubes of glow sticks, and a few bags of glitter went into his bag, and with that, he was ready to go. 

The clients' house was one he’d been to before. The only difference being that, the previous time he’d been, he’d been doing a wedding photo shoot for the parents. The two of them had paid him quite a large sum for that shoot, so he wasn’t complaining. After parking his car next to the black BMW, he rang the doorbell and waited. A few moments later the door opened to reveal a woman - probably in her mid to late thirties - wearing a knee-length floral dress and four inch, leo