Marked by His Infidelity

Chapter One

Rowan

The needle finds its rhythm before I do. That's how it's always worked for me, the machine settles into its hum and my hand just follows, and somewhere in the first thirty seconds my head clears out enough to actually see the line I'm laying instead of the ten other things sitting on top of it.

Right now that line is the outer curve of a barn swallow, black wing tucked tight against a young guy's ribs, and he's gripping the edge of the table like it's going to buck him off.

"You're doing fine, Marcus," I say, not looking up. "Breathe through your nose. You look like you're about to give birth."

"I am giving birth. To this bird."

Deb laughs from the front counter without turning around, and Marcus grins even though it costs him, jaw tight against the sting.

He's twenty-two, works at the garage two doors down, came in with a photo of his grandmother's swallow tattoo torn out of an old photo album, edges soft from handling.

I didn't charge him full price for that.

Some jobs you take because the money's fine and some you take because a kid wants to carry his grandmother's ink on his own skin and that's worth doing right.

"Grandma Alvarez used to say a swallow finds its way home no matter how far it flies," Marcus says, voice tight around the pain but pushing through it anyway. "Had this one on her wrist since before my mom was born. Said it kept her honest about coming back."

"She sounds like she was a good egg."

"She was a pain in my ass, actually. But yeah. Good egg too." He laughs, then hisses when the laugh moves something in his ribs he wasn't braced for. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize to me. Apologize to your abs." I switch needles, dip, get back to the wingtip, working the feather detail in short, careful strokes. "You want it exact to the photo, or you want me to clean the linework up some? The original's a little heavy-handed."

"Exact. She did it herself, I think. Prison tattoo, technically. Don't tell my mom I said that."

"Your secret's safe. I've done worse for better reasons."

That's the truth of it, most days. People walk in here carrying something they've never said out loud to another living soul, and by the time they leave they've handed me a piece of it without meaning to, just from sitting still long enough for the needle to work.

I used to think that was the strange part of this job.

Now I think it might be the whole point.

I've had my hands on a thousand different pieces of other people's grief and joy in this room.

I know what a want looks like when someone's had it a long time before they finally walk through my door and say it out loud.

I built Marked on that. Four years now, my name on the lease, my name on the wall, nobody else's.

I opened this place with a loan I was terrified to sign for and four thousand dollars my father left me, money I'd been too stubborn to touch for two years because spending it felt like admitting he was really gone.

Wyatt co-signed the loan because the bank wanted two incomes on paper, and neither of us thought twice about it at the time.

That was six years ago, back when signing anything together felt like the easiest decision in the world.

I've had eight months and a lawyer's business card sitting in my nightstand drawer to change that, and some stubborn, unexamined part of me never got around to it, and now I'm out of excuses for why.

I wipe the line clean, dip again, keep going.

The shop is exactly the way I want it at nine in the morning, quiet except for the machine and the radio Deb's got turned down low behind the counter, coffee going stale in the pot because neither of us drinks it after ten.

Exposed brick on the east wall that I fought the landlord over uncovering.

My own flash taped up behind the register, twenty years of drawings, half of them things nobody's ever asked for and I keep up there anyway because they're mine.

This is the part of my life nobody gets to touch. That's not bitterness talking. It's just true, and it's taken me a long time to be able to say it that plainly.

Marcus leaves forty minutes later with his grandmother's swallow wrapped in plastic and a printout on aftercare, and I flip the sign, and Deb comes around the counter with two coffees even though we both know mine's going to sit there.

"You didn't charge him enough," she says.

"I charged him what it was worth to him."

"Same thing you said about the Kowalski kid's memorial piece.

And the little half-sleeve for that girl whose dad died in the oil field thing.

" Deb leans against my station, arms crossed, dark hair pulled back tight the way she wears it when she's about to needle me about something bigger than money.

"You're going to run a nonprofit tattoo shop for the emotionally wrecked youth of Larkspur and call it a business plan. "

"It's working so far."

"It's working because you're good and everyone knows it." She sips her coffee, grimaces at how cold it's already gone, and sets it down without drinking more. "I'm just saying, at some point being the nice one in this town has got to pay actual rent."

"You're one to talk. You did Sarah Denny's whole back piece for cost because she cried in your chair for twenty minutes about her divorce."

"That's different. Sarah cried strategically. I respect the hustle."

"It pays fine, Deb. We're not exactly starving."

"No. We're exactly comfortable, which is its own kind of trap if you let it be." She says it lighter than it lands, and I let it sit there a second instead of arguing, because she's not wrong, not really, and we both know it.

There's a real edge under her teasing, the same edge that's been under half our conversations since I moved into the apartment upstairs.

Deb's protective in a way that doesn't ask permission.

She was protective of me before any of this happened, when we were just two women who happened to share a wall of the shop and a taste for the same coffee.

Now she's protective the way you get when you watched someone rebuild something with her hands after it got knocked flat, and you don't plan on standing by if anyone tries to knock it flat again.

I don't answer, because she's not wrong, and because some habits from growing up broke or close to it don't leave just because the bank account looks different now.

My father used to say something similar, actually.

He rode with the Reapers back when the charter was half its current size and twice as broke, and he never once turned away a kid who needed stitches closed up quiet or a debt forgiven because the alternative was worse for everybody.

I didn't understand until I was grown that he was running his own kind of business plan too, one where the ledger wasn't only money.

I think about him more than I let on. He's been gone six years and I still catch myself wanting to ask him things, mostly about whether he'd have seen this coming with Wyatt before I did.

He probably would have. He was Reaper enough to know exactly what a man does with too much room to roam.

I don't let myself finish that thought all the way. I've gotten good at that too, catching a thought half a second before it turns into the wrong kind of night.

Deb heads to the back to restock ink, and I sit at my station doing paperwork I've been putting off, and for about twenty minutes the morning is just a morning.

Then I glance up out of habit at the empty stool across the room, the one that used to be Wyatt's spot on the days he'd come sit and read while I worked, not saying much, just being a warm, solid presence in the corner of my eye.

I sold that stool's twin at a yard sale eight months ago and kept this one anyway, out of some spite I haven't examined too closely.

That's the wound talking. It's always right there, closer to the surface than I let anyone see, even Deb. Even myself, most days.

I remember exactly where I was standing when I found out.

Not the marriage-ending version of finding out, the smaller, first version, the one I actually believed for a while because believing it was easier than the alternative.

I was standing right here, this exact spot, phone in my hand, looking at a photo some stranger's cousin had posted from a bar in Amarillo.

Wyatt's arm slung easy around a woman I'd never seen before, and on the inside of her forearm, unmistakable even through a bad phone photo, a compass rose.

My compass rose. The one I inked into Wyatt's forearm myself on our third anniversary, four hidden coordinates worked into the linework, the exact spot on the map where we first stood next to each other at a charity ride and he asked for my number like he was scared of the answer.

She had a copy of it. Not a similar piece. A copy, close enough that whoever inked it had clearly worked from a photo of his arm.

I remember my hands going cold before anything else did, phone screen too bright in the afternoon light, and the strange, useless thought that came first wasn't even about him.

It was about the coordinates. About how careful I'd been, four years earlier, making sure nobody looking at that tattoo would ever guess what the numbers meant unless I told them myself.

I'd protected that secret like it was something precious, and there it was on a stranger's arm, no context needed, because the context wasn't the point anymore.

The point was that someone had gotten close enough to describe every detail of it from memory.