He studied her for a moment longer — her face, her pinned-up hair, her wrist with the cuff pulled down tight — and then he was gone, and Nora went to the kitchen and stood by the heat of the pass until her hands stopped shaking, and told herself, firmly, that rich people were strange and that was the end of it.
Chapter 2
The Woman Who Stared
Nora told herself it was nothing. Rich people were strange; everyone who worked service jobs knew that the way sailors know weather. A woman has a moment, drops a glass, walks out — it happened. Old griefs surfaced at odd times; Nora had seen a man cry into his soup on the anniversary of his wife's death and then tip thirty percent and apologize to the soup. She finished the Friday shift on autopilot, split the Beaumont table's surprisingly generous tip with the busser, and went home to her one-bedroom above the laundromat with the smell of detergent permanently in the walls and the dryer hum coming up through the floor like a lullaby.
But she dreamed about the woman's face. That fractured-window look. In the dream, the star on her wrist was glowing faintly gold, and the woman kept trying to touch it, and Nora kept pulling away. She woke at four with her heart pounding and stood at the kitchenette sink, looking at the star under the bare bulb. It was just a birthmark. Mabel had told her it ran in the family. That was all.
On Tuesday, the hostess flagged her before service, her eyes wide. "She's back. Table twelve. Asked for you by name."
Nora's stomach dropped somewhere around her knees. "The Beaumont woman?"
"Just her this time. Early seating. She called this afternoon — specifically requested your section." The hostess lowered her voice. "Nora, is everything okay? After Friday—"
"Everything's fine." Nora tied her apron with fingers that felt like someone else's. "It's fine."
Claire Beaumont sat alone at the six-top, a glass of water untouched in front of her, her coat folded neatly over the next chair. She looked smaller than Friday — tired, shadows under her eyes that makeup hadn't fully hidden. When Nora approached, she stood up. Actually stood up, pushing her chair back, like Nora was someone important, someone she'd been waiting for.
"Nora," she said. "Thank you for coming over. I owe you an apology for Friday. I wasn't well. Please — sit with me a moment?"
Servers did not sit with guests. But the dining room was nearly empty, and something in the woman's face made refusal feel cruel. Nora perched on the edge of the opposite chair.
"I wanted to explain," Claire said. "That mark on your wrist." She paused, and Nora watched her assemble the words the way you'd assemble something fragile. "My daughter — my baby daughter — had one exactly like it. In exactly that place. She was taken from us twenty-four years ago. Three days old." Her voice was steady, rehearsed, the way people sound when they've said something to themselves a thousand times in the dark. "I've spent half my life looking at children's wrists. I know how it sounds."
Nora felt the floor tilt slightly under her chair. "I'm sorry," she said, because what else was there to say to a thing like that. "That's — that's awful. But I have a family, Mrs. Beaumont. I was raised by my aunt in Greyfield. My mother died when I was a baby. Car accident. I'm not — I'm sorry, but I'm not who you're looking for."
"I know it sounds mad." Claire's hands were folded so tightly the knuckles were white, the gold ring glinting. "I know what I must look like. A rich old woman chasing ghosts through restaurants. But would you tell me — how old are you?"
"Twenty-four."
"And your birthday?"
Nora hesitated. It was on her driver's license. It had always been true. "March. March 2002."
Something flickered in Claire's eyes — quick, like a struck match in a dark room. "What day in March?"
"The seventeenth."
Claire nodded slowly, and the match went out, and what was left behind was something careful, something banked. "My Lillian was born March fourteenth." She reached into her handbag and slid a photograph across the table — a baby, three days old, asleep in a hospital bassinet, a tiny star-shaped shadow just visible on one thin wrist. "The nurses called her my little star."
Nora stared at the photograph until her vision blurred at the edges. The baby's wrist. The little star. Her own wrist throbbed under her cuff as if the mark knew it was being discussed. Then she pushed the photograph back across the white cloth, stood up so fast her chair scraped, and said, "I have tables," in a voice that didn't sound like hers, and walked into the kitchen and stood in the walk-in cooler among the hanging herbs and the stacked dairy until her hands stopped shaking and her breath came back.
She came back out ten minutes later, her cheeks pink from the cold, her professional face reassembled. Table twelve was empty. There was a hundred-dollar bill under the water glass, and on the back of the reservation card, in elegant handwriting that slanted slightly uphill: Forgive me. — C.B.
Nora put the hundred in her apron pocket and the card in the trash. Then, after a moment, she fished the card out of the trash, smoothed it flat, and put it in her pocket too. She told herself she didn't know why.
On Wednesday, Lena Ruiz — who had worked the floor beside Nora for two years and could read her the way Nora read tables — cornered her by the dessert station. "You've checked your wrist four times tonight," Lena said. "And you've been pouring like the bottles owe you money. Spill."
"It's nothing. A customer got weird on Friday. Rich lady, dropped a glass."
"Weird how?"
Nora hesitated, then pushed up her cuff and showed Lena the star. "She saw this and lost it. Said her baby had one just like it. A baby that died — no, that was taken. Twenty-four years ago." She laughed, but it came out thin. "She asked me when I was born, Lena. Like I was — like I could be —"