Chapter 7 The Birthmark

• Chapter Seven: The Scar
• He found out about the scar by accident.
• That was the part I hadn’t fully planned for. Not the finding — I had always known the finding was coming, had built the entire thing around it, had chosen this face and this name and this city because I wanted him to find it.
• I just hadn’t accounted for the specific way it would happen. The intimacy and smallness of it.
• We were looking at documents in his office, late on a Wednesday, the city doing its amber thing outside the window while Brett ran through numbers on a screen and Daniel and I sat side by side at the long table going through the restructuring proposal I’d suggested three weeks ago.
• The one that looked like a lifeline with four clauses in it that weren’t.
• My jacket was off. It had been a long day and the office was warm. I had stopped performing comfort hours ago.
• He reached across me for a page then his hand passed over my wrist.
• He didn’t touch it and he didn’t need to. His eyes dropped the way eyes drop when something registers below the level of conscious thought, and I felt the exact moment it happened, the stillness that moved through him like a current finding ground.
• He picked up the page and he kept talking but something had changed in the room and we both knew it and neither of us said so.
• Brett kept talking about the restructuring numbers and the city kept doing its amber thing and I kept my breathing even, my expression clear and I thought — okay. Here we are and a little bit earlier than expected.
• The meeting ended at eight.
• Brett left first, grateful and obvious about it.
• The associates had gone hours ago. It was just Daniel and me and the remains of the working dinner nobody had finished, and he stood at the window with his back to me and didn’t say anything for long enough that it stopped being comfortable silence.
• “You have a scar and a birthmark,” he said.
• “Most people do.”
• “On your left wrist. The inside.”
• I started stacking papers. “Old injury and Natural mark”
• “What type?”
• “The healed type.”
• He turned around. He was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on him before, or maybe one I had only seen once, briefly, in the rearview mirror of a memory I didn’t visit often.
• Something that wasn’t quite recognition and wasn’t quite doubt and sat in the space between them doing quiet damage.
• “Mara had a birthmark,” he said. “Same place.”
• I looked up from the papers.
• “Your wife?,” I asked with a well played expression.
• “My late wife.”
• “I’m sorry for your loss.”
• The words landed in the room and stayed there. He watched my face with the focus of a man trying to solve something, and I held his gaze with the pleasant, impenetrable expression I had spent three years building specifically for this moment, and the silence stretched between us like something being tested for weight.
• “It’s a common location for most people’s Birthmarks,” I said.
• “Is it?.”
• I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair. “I was curious about my own and did a research”
• He said nothing.
• I pulled my jacket on slowly with no visible rush. The birthmark and the scar disappeared under the sleeve and I smoothed the cuff and picked up my bag and looked at him with exactly the right amount of polite confusion for a woman who had just been compared to a dead person by a business partner at the end of a long day.
• “Daniel.”
• “Yeah.”
• “Are you alright?”
• The question sat between us and I watched it work on him. The way it reframed everything.
• Because if I was asking whether he was alright, I was a stranger who had noticed he was acting strangely and if I was a stranger who had noticed he was acting strangely then I was not what the other part of his brain was currently, desperately trying to work out.
• He ran a hand across his jaw.
• “Long week,” he said.
• “Go home,” I said. “The restructuring will still be broken tomorrow.”
• Something moved across his face that was almost a smile.
• I said goodnight and walked out. I took the elevator down and crossed the lobby stepping into the night air and stood on the sidewalk for exactly four seconds before I allowed myself to breathe properly.
• He’d seen it.
• The seed was in.
• Whatever he did next would tell me everything about how much time I had left and I needed that information badly because Taska had called my assistant that afternoon to suggest lunch and Taska suggesting lunch was not a social gesture.
• I was not going to pretend otherwise.
• Two clocks are running now.
• I flagged a car and got in.
• I pulled out my phone and opened the message thread with my attorney, I typed. Move the timeline up. Everything by Friday.
• Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again
• How much faster?
• I looked out the window at the city sliding past, all that lit glass and indifferent motion, and I thought about the look on his face at the window.
• The not-quite-recognition.
• The dawning.
• All of it, I typed. Now.