Chapter 3 - Something Behind His Ear
I carried Ella to the dessert table, sat her on a lounger, and put a lemon square in her hand. She ate it slowly, swinging her feet, calm again like nothing had happened.
But I couldn't let it go. That white face. The way he'd nearly dropped her.
"Grief," I told myself. "That's all it is. Kids and grief."
Except it wasn't the kind of shock a weird comment from a child gives you. It was the kind of shock a person shows when someone accidentally says the exact thing they've been terrified to hear out loud.
Kayla's voice drifted back to me. What it does to how people see you.
I stood, asked Mrs. Alvarez from accounting to keep an eye on Ella, and walked toward the corner where Warren had disappeared.
He was standing under the pergola with Dominic Barrett, his business partner. Both of them held fresh drinks. Warren's back was to me. I slowed down, waiting for a gap in their conversation so I could apologize one more time.
Dominic's voice carried over, warm and teasing.
"So the renovation — you're really doing the whole second-floor rebuild? For a family? Warren, come on. Are you finally settling down on us?"
I couldn't hear Warren's answer. It was low and short.
But I saw his shoulders go tight under the linen jacket. That specific stillness a person gets when a question lands somewhere it isn't supposed to.
My stomach dropped.
A second-floor rebuild. For a family. Warren didn't have a family. He'd never married. No kids. His parents lived in Florida. His sister was in Denver with three teenagers who wouldn't be caught dead in his guest room.
So who was the family?
I stood there holding a cocktail napkin I didn't remember picking up, and the deck seemed to tilt a little under my feet.
I looked at the back of Warren's head again, and the memory of his drained face sharpened into something I wasn't ready to say out loud.
Almost against my will, my eyes lifted to the back of his ear, and Ella's words played again.
At first there was nothing. Just skin, the edge of his collar, and the graying hair he'd been letting grow longer these past few months.
Then a spotlight swung, catching him from a different angle, and I saw it.
A tiny tattoo. Still a little pink around the edges. A compass rose, no bigger than a dime, tucked right behind his earlobe.
My knees went to water.
Danny had that exact tattoo. Exact same spot. The same little compass rose he'd gotten at nineteen on a road trip through Durango with his best friend.
Danny used to joke that nobody ever noticed it. But Ella had. A thousand times, riding on his shoulders, her small fingers tracing that mark like it was a secret only the two of them shared.
To a four-year-old who missed her daddy, that tattoo wasn't a symbol. It was him.
"Oh my God, how is this even possible?" I screamed, before I could stop myself.
Warren spun around. His eyes found mine, and something in his face just came apart.
"Nora? You okay?"
"I — I just remembered I told the sitter I'd call. I should go."
"You don't have a sitter tonight."
May you like
"My friend. I meant my friend. I'm sorry, I have to —"
I didn't wait for him to finish. I collected Ella, mumbled something about her being tired, and drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel.
