The Day I Put My Heels On in an Atlanta Parking Lot.

The morning it happened, I thought I was going to work. That is the thing I want you to understand first — I had no idea. I was wearing blue jeans and a black tank top, the way he had specifically told me to dress, and I had my heels in a bag in the backseat because he'd said to bring them. I assumed he meant we might need me to stand in as a height reference between sets. Photographers do that. That is what I thought the heels were for.

I thought I was going to work. I was going to something else entirely.

How it started — which is really how everything started.

To tell this properly, I have to back up. Michael Carson did not appear in my life the day of the signing. He appeared when I was in college, at UAH, with a brand-new Facebook account and a few senior portraits posted without any particular intention. I was not trying to be seen. And he saw me anyway.

He reached out through Ken Laurence — a fashion designer who would later compete on Project Runway — who asked if I would take photos for a collection. I said yes. My mother and aunt drove down to Montgomery with me for that first shoot. Mike was behind the camera. I was a complete novice. I loved every second of it with a certainty that surprised even me.

After that, Mike and I kept working together. He wasn't just taking photos — he was educating me. How light works. How a background sets the emotional register of an image before the subject even enters the frame. What a photographer is actually looking for, and why understanding that makes you a better model rather than just a better subject. I also started assisting him on shoots — which is how I ended up in Atlanta that afternoon, in those particular blue jeans, with those particular heels in the backseat.

The shoot before — and the watch he kept checking.

We were there for a full shoot day, working with a fashion stylist whose creativity I found genuinely inspiring. Then the first half wrapped. The model needed two hours for an intricate hair and makeup detail. And Mike started checking his watch. Not casually. Deliberately. The way someone checks a watch when they are trying to hit a specific time.

He got in the car and drove fast, toward Auburn Avenue. I was asking questions — where are we going, what is happening — and he was not answering. He pulled into a parking lot near the beltline, before the beltline became the thing it is now, and stopped the car.

“Put your heels on,” he said. I got the heels out of the backseat. I put them on. And then I walked fast to keep up with him across that parking lot, into a two-story outdoor complex. Still asking questions. Still not getting answers. Until we reached the door.

The door — and everything it said without words.

Click Models. That is what the door said. I turned and looked at Mike — and he looked back without a single word, but saying everything. Yes, we are doing this. Yes, you are here. Yes, walk in.

I walked in. A sweet receptionist greeted us. Mike asked if we were too late for the open call. She smiled and said no — please fill out this form. She went around the corner. And then we heard it, lowered but not lowered enough: you have to come see this girl.

I was still filling out the form when a small group of women came around the corner. I heard their reactions before I looked up. One asked me to stand. I stood. They all looked — every one of them, from my feet to my face. They asked me to walk the hallway. I walked. They took a few digitals. And then, on the spot, they offered me a contract.

The drive home — and the silence that held everything.

We had to go back to the original shoot. So I did — contract in hand, completely numb — and worked the rest of the afternoon the way you work when your mind is somewhere else. I went back to being the assistant, holding the reflector, resetting the backdrop. Mike told the stylist: I just got her signed with Click. And Click was a very big deal in Atlanta at that time. The stylist knew exactly what that meant.

I drove back to Birmingham that night. Mike, I learned later, sat wondering whether he had pushed me into something I wasn't ready for. He hadn't. He had given me the greatest thing anyone had given me to that point: he had walked through a door with me so I didn't have to walk through it alone. That is not a small thing. That is everything.

I didn't say much on the drive. The contract was in my lap — real paper with real terms and a real agency name — and the weight of it was almost more than I could process while navigating a highway in the dark. So I didn't try. I just drove. And somewhere on that drive I started to understand that the before and after of my life were now divided by an afternoon in an Atlanta parking lot, when a man I trusted handed me a pair of heels and said nothing else.

What happened after — and why the before matters.

Back home, I shared everything with my mother. We called my aunt, who connected us with a family attorney willing to look at the contract and protect my interests. The terms were standard: 20 percent from print, 15 percent from film, a two-year exclusive. The lawyer reviewed it and said it was fair. I prayed about it. I sat with it alone. Then I wrote that note to myself and faxed the signed contract to Click Atlanta from my lawyer's office. Just like that, I was a signed fashion model with a legitimate agency in Atlanta.

But the real work, as I wrote then and know now, was only beginning.

What Mike gave me — and why I'm still saying thank you.

I have thought a great deal about what it means to have someone in your corner who sees you before you see yourself. Not someone who flatters you — flattery is easy and cheap and everywhere. Someone who actually looks at you, with all their professional knowledge, and concludes: there is something here. And then acts on it. Goes out of their way. Checks their watch. Drives fast across Atlanta. Says nothing and lets the door explain itself.

We are still close — fifteen-plus years of friendship built on mutual respect and a shared belief in what Birmingham, and Alabama, has to offer the women who grow up here and decide not to let anyone else's low expectations become the ceiling of their ambition.

— Infinity