Completely, absolutely steady.
For the first time in five years, the micro-tremor that has lived in my fingers since I walked away from medicine is gone. Theghost tremor that made me put down the scalpel. That ended my career. That told me every morning when I reached for the coffee pot that I was a man who had killed a child and my body would never let me forget it.
Gone.
I hold my right hand in front of me, fingers extended, the way I used to test myself every morning at the hospital. Rock steady. Not a flicker. The hand that could not be trusted to hold a scalpel is now the hand that held this woman upright while she came apart.
I do not say it. But it is on my face. It must be, because Lucia looks up at me and her expression shifts. A crack opens behind her eyes and whatever she sees in mine makes her reach up and press her palm flat against my chest, directly over my heart.
I exhale.
The first full, unguarded exhale since the day I stopped being whole.
She rests there. Hand on my heart. Forehead tilted up toward mine. I turn, angling my shoulder to pull the towel tighter around her, and the movement shifts her line of sight.
She goes rigid.
One second she is soft and warm and pressed against my chest. The next every muscle in her body has turned to stone. Her hand on my heart stops being tender and becomes an anchor.
Her breath stops.
“Lucia.”
She does not respond. She is staring at my back. At the reflection in the mirror, or at the direct line of sight the angle has given her. I cannot see what she is seeing but the moment her world rearranges itself is a vibration that passes through her hand into my skin.
“Jude.” Her voice is barely a whisper. No tremor. No hesitation. Costa women do not shake when the ground opens beneath them. They name the abyss. “Were you on the flight from Chicago to Montana. Five years ago.”
Not a question. The period at the end of it is audible.
Every cell in my body goes still.
The birthmark. Irregular. Dark. A shape I have carried on the left side of my back for thirty-four years, a shape I have never thought twice about because it is mine, it has always been mine, unremarkable as the knuckle scars and the surgical calluses and every other marking my body has accumulated across a lifetime of use.
A shape identical to the one on a four-year-old girl sleeping ten feet away with a grey wolf under her chin.
The lullaby plays on.
I do not move.
18
LUCIA
“There’s coffee.”
Nick’s voice from the hallway. Not inside the bathroom. Not asking for entry. Just the simple fact of coffee and the gray, pre-dawn light filtered through wood and plaster—delivered in the flat, commanding tone he uses for operational briefings
He does not ask if I am all right. He already knows the answer is complicated. He does not knock. He does not wait.
“When you’re ready,” he says.
His boots move away down the hall.
The birthmark is on his left shoulder blade.
Irregular. Dark. A shape I have traced a hundred times on a different body. A smaller body. A body I grew inside mine and delivered into a world that did not want her and raised in a compound full of people who looked at her like proof of my failure.
Jude has gone still.