Page 27

My hands stop moving. "You don't have to."

"I said I would." He keeps his head down. "Her name was Shannon. We got married when I was twenty-eight. Faith was born when I was thirty, and ten months after that I came home from a night shift and the car was gone. Faith was at my mother's. Shannon had dropped her off at two in the morning with a diaper bag and no explanation."

I start moving my thumbs again, slowly, because I think he needs me to.

"There was a note on the refrigerator. It was under one of those magnets, a lemon, one of a set. It said she wasn't built for this and she was sorry and not to look for her." His voice is very even. "I looked anyway. She was in Arizona with a cousin by the end of the weekend. She sent a card on Faith's second birthday with a twenty in it. There've been four cards since. Faith keeps them in a shoebox."

"Does she ask about her?"

"Not often. She asked once why her mom's name is on the cards and not on the fridge." He lets out a breath that isn't quite a laugh. "I threw the lemon magnet out the day after. I don't know why I tell you that. It's not important."

"It's the most important thing you've said all day."

His shoulders rise and fall. I take my hands off his neck for a moment, scoop up more cream, and lay them flat on either side of his spine. I stay there, warm and still, with my palms against his back.

"I thought if I was enough, she wouldn't have gone. So I stopped letting people see whether I was."

"And the flirting."

"Is a very good way to be liked without being known."

"It works."

"It's worked for years." He turns his head a little, enough that I can see his profile and the line of his jaw in the lamplight. "Your turn."

"My father left when I was seven." I say it to the top of his head, to the dark curl at the back of his neck. "He came back three times that I can remember, each with a different reason, and each time left again within a month. My mother raised me. Nell was the only person on that side who ever kept showing up. She sent me a birthday card every year with a ten-dollar bill and a note about the weather."

"And then you stopped coming."

"When I was fourteen. My father wanted to sell the orchard to pay a debt, and Nell wouldn't, and they stopped speaking. He decided if she was out of his life, she was out of mine." My thumbs find the knot again and sink into it. "My mother didn't push. She'd had enough fights. My father died six years ago, so when Nell died the orchard came to me."

"You never went back."

"I was fourteen. Then I was twenty. Then it was too long." I press harder. He groans quietly. "I was with a man named Grant for eight months. He never introduced me to anyone. Not a friend, not a sibling. I met his sister once, in a parking lot, and he wouldn't let me out of the car."

Ethan's head comes up. "He wouldn't let you out of the car."

"He said it wasn't the right time. That was the phrase. It was never the right time, and then one day it was just never." I make myself laugh. "I stayed in the car. I sat there with my hands in my lap and waved."

He turns in the chair. He has to twist to do it. He winces as the shoulder moves. Then he's looking up at me from three inches away with his hair rumpled from my hands and his eyes dark and level and entirely serious. There's no joke in his face at all.

"I told you I don't call. I told you I'm out the door by five-thirty. I gave you the ending before the beginning, and you said it was efficient."

"I was lying."

"I know."

"I was going to be fine with it."

"And now?"

"Now I've met your daughter, and she wants me to do the voices."

He laughs. It breaks out of him and then fades. He reaches up and puts his hand on the side of my face. His palm is warm and rough with the cream on it and the pad of his thumb rests under my eye. He looks at me as if he's reading something he hasn't expected to find.

"Carolina," he says.

I bend. He tips his head back against my stomach. I find his mouth upside down. It's a strange angle, clumsy and sweet. His beard is rough against my chin and my hair falls forward around us in a damp curtain. He makes a low sound in his throat and his hand slides into the back of my hair and holds. We're both laughing a little, helplessly, and then we aren't.