Chapter 1: May I See Your Birthmark?
The restaurant kept its lights low the way it kept its prices high — as a matter of policy. Eleanor had chosen the corner table because the light there was kindest, a single wall sconce throwing a warm oval across the linen, and because from it she could watch the room without being watched back. Twenty-three years of charity boards had taught her that much: never sit with your back to the door, and never let anyone see you looking.
Richard was reading the wine list the way he read everything — slightly bent forward, glasses low on his nose, as if the words might try to escape. The foundation gala had ended an hour ago, and he still wore the evening like a damp coat. She could tell by the line of his shoulders that he was already rehearsing tomorrow's board call.
"Maison Laurent does a decent Burgundy," she said, "or did we decide we're pretending to like pinot now?"
He didn't look up. "We decided the foundation likes whatever the donors like."
The waitress arrived before Eleanor could answer. She was young — twenty-two, twenty-three — dark hair pulled back with the kind of severity that suggested she was tired of being told she looked younger than she was. She moved with practiced economy: water poured, menus aligned, bread set down without a word wasted.
"Good evening," the girl said. "Can I start you with anything?"
Richard ordered the duck. Eleanor asked for the sole, and as she spoke, the girl reached across to clear a crumb from the edge of the tablecloth — a small, reflexive gesture — and her sleeve rode up.
Eleanor saw it on the inside of the girl's left wrist.
For a moment the room went thin and far away, the way it had gone in the hospital corridor all those years ago, the walls bending at the edges of her vision. She heard the girl saying something about the special, and she heard Richard say "excellent," and none of it mattered, because there on the pale skin above the girl's pulse was a heart.
Not a tattoo. A birthmark. Reddish-brown at the edges, darker at its center, the size of a coin, shaped with an impossible neatness — the two lobes of the heart, the point tapering down toward her palm.
Eleanor's own wrist remembered the weight of it before her mind did. She had touched a mark exactly like that, twenty-three years ago, with the tip of one finger, in the blue hour before dawn in a hospital room. She had traced it while the baby slept against her chest, and it had been the most certain thing in the world: this one is mine, this one I would know anywhere.
The fork slipped from her hand. It struck the plate with a bright clatter that carried across the restaurant.
"Ma'am?" The girl stepped back, startled. "Is everything — "
"I'm sorry." Eleanor's voice came from somewhere low and unfamiliar. "I'm so sorry. It's — your birthmark. On your wrist."
The girl glanced down at her own arm, then back up, a waitress's polite concern already rearranging itself into something more guarded. "Oh. Yeah. Had it forever."
"May I see it?" Eleanor heard herself say. "Just — may I see it more closely?"
There was a pause. The girl looked at Richard, the way young women looked at older men for permission or reassurance, and Eleanor felt a flare of something ugly and hot — jealousy, grief, she couldn't tell them apart anymore. The girl extended her wrist across the table, palm up, the way one offers a hand to be read.
Eleanor did not take it. She only looked. Up close, the mark was exactly as she remembered — the reddish-brown border, the darker heart of the heart — and her throat closed so completely that she had to press her fingers against the tablecloth to keep her hands from shaking.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"Twenty-three." The girl withdrew her arm, her sleeve falling back into place like a curtain. "I'll get your wine. Sorry about the — " She gestured vaguely at the fork, the interruption, the strange woman asking about her skin. Then she was gone, swallowed by the low light between the tables.
Eleanor stared at the empty space where she had stood.
"Eleanor." Richard's voice was very quiet. The wine list lay forgotten. His hands were flat on either side of his plate, and she noticed — she noticed everything now, the way she had noticed everything that night in the hospital — that they were not quite still. "What was that?"
"I dropped my fork."
"That wasn't about a fork."
She looked at him. Sixty-two years old, silver at the temples, the man she had married at twenty-seven in a church in Back Bay, the father of a child who had lived for five days. His eyes were fixed on her with a steadiness she recognized. It was the same steadiness he had shown her in the hospital corridor when he had come back from the room she had not been allowed to enter, and told her what had happened, and told her what needed to be done.
"Her wrist," Eleanor said. "Richard. Did you see her wrist?"
"She's a waitress in a restaurant, Eleanor."
"She has a heart-shaped birthmark on the inside of her left wrist."
Something moved behind his face — a door closing, quick and silent. He picked up his water glass and drank, and when he set it down, his hand was perfectly steady again, and she hated him for it.
"People have birthmarks," he said.
"Not that one."
"You're tired. It was a long evening."