Chapter Eleven
Ava
The third session is booked for Tuesday.
I know his schedule well enough by now to work around it.
Home game Wednesday, practice Thursday and Friday, travel Saturday.
Tuesday evenings are mine. Or they have been for the past three weeks, in the specific way things become yours when you stop admitting what you’re doing and start building a life around it instead.
I close the studio at six, same as always.
Zoe leaves first, winding her scarf twice around her neck and giving me a look on her way out the door.
It’s the look she’s been giving me for two weeks, which is somewhere between delighted and deeply suspicious.
I haven’t confirmed anything. She hasn’t asked directly.
We exist in a comfortable arrangement of plausible deniability and the understanding she’ll be insufferable once she has actual information to work with.
After hours, the studio is at its best, with the overhead lights off, the task lamps on, and the Edison bulbs warm along the back wall. The street noise drops once the post-work foot traffic thins. I can hear myself think in here, which is the thing I’ve spent three weeks trying to avoid.
I’m laying out my station when the bell above the door chimes.
Reece comes in carrying a brown paper bag and wearing a cap pulled low, which is his version of being inconspicuous. On anyone else, it would work. On him, it mostly serves to highlight the jaw.
“You’re early,” I say.
“I was in the area.”
“You’re always in the area.”
“I’m in the area when I want to be.” He sets the bag on my desk. “I brought food. Thai, Pad See Ew.”
I look at the bag, then at him. The cap is slightly crooked, and he has the particular bright-eyed energy he carries after a good practice, the kind where everything clicked, and he knows it.
I’ve learned to read his versions of good and bad days the way I read clients.
It’s in the set of the shoulders, the pace of the walk, the way the mouth sits when it thinks no one is watching.
“You can’t keep showing up here with food,” I say.
“And yet here I am… with food.” He pulls two containers from the bag. “Sit down. Eat. Then I’ll be an excellent patient, and you can stab me with a needle.”
“It’s not stabbing.”
“It feels like stabbing.”
“It’s precision linework.”
“Precision stabbing,” he says, and pushes a container toward me.
I sit and eat the Pad See Ew, which is annoyingly perfect.
The session starts at seven.
He’s on the chair, shirt off, positioned on his left side with his arm raised.
I’ve seen this view four times now between the first session and the follow-up checks, and I have not gotten any more professional about it.
The tattoo sits clean on his ribs. We are two sessions in, and it’s healing beautifully, exactly the lines I intended.
Tonight, I’m adding the shading that gives the bird its depth, the fine work that makes the feathers read as real.
“Ready?” I say.
“Born ready.”
“You said that last time and then gripped the armrest for forty minutes.”
“I was meditating.”
“You were white-knuckling.”
“Same thing,” he says, and I hear him take the slow breath he uses to settle himself. It’s the same breath I’ve noticed he takes on the mound before a pitch.
I turn on the machine.
There’s a quality to the silence tonight I can’t name.
It’s not uncomfortable. We’ve long passed uncomfortable silence and arrived somewhere on the other side of it, the place where quiet between two people means something rather than nothing.
He’s still, good at it now, and his breathing is controlled.
I work the shading in sections, building the depth gradually, the way good tattoo work always goes, with patience over speed and layers over shortcuts.
“Tell me something,” he says at the forty-minute mark.
“About the design?”
“About you.”
I lift the needle and assess the section. “You know things about me.”
“I know the surface things. The studio, the coffee order, the fact you reorganize your ink bottles when you’re anxious.”
“I don’t—”
“Three times last week.”
I return to the shading. “What do you want to know?”
“Why you stay here. This city. You could have opened anywhere.”
I consider the question for a moment, the needle steady. “My father is here.”
“That’s the practical answer.”
“It’s the true one.”
“It’s half of one.”
I sit back and look at what I’ve done, buying myself a few seconds.
The bird is starting to take on dimension now, the feathers catching fictional light.
“The other half is the studio itself. I found this space before I had any reason to take it. Walked past it on a Tuesday afternoon, looked through the window, and knew.” I return to the work.
“Some things you can’t explain past that. ”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I get it. First time I walked out to the mound at a major league stadium, I knew I was supposed to be there. Couldn’t have told you why.”
“And now?”
“Now I know why, but it took a while.”
I finish the section and sit back again, stretching my fingers.
He turns his head slightly. “How does it look?”
I hold up my phone.
He studies the image. “The feathers,” he says.
“I know.”
“You can see them.”
“Two more sessions and you’ll be able to count them.” I set my phone down. “Lie still.”
He does, and I return to the machine.
Outside, a car passes. Then another. Then the street settles.
I’m working on the final section of tonight’s shading, the wing’s inner edge, the finest lines of the piece, when I hear it.
The engine.
Low, steady, a particular idle I’ve heard three times a week for most of my life. The sound of my father’s truck, which I can identify the way people identify voices, without effort, without having to think about it.
My hand stops.
Not a flinch. A stop. The needle lifts from the skin before I make a conscious decision to lift it.
“Ava?” Reece questions when he hears the change in the machine’s sound.
“Don’t move.” My voice comes out even, which is its own kind of miracle, because my heart has just gone from a normal resting rate to something considerably less resting in the space of two seconds. “And don’t sit up.”
“What?”
“My father’s truck.” I set the machine down. “It’s outside.”
The silence that follows has a different quality from all the other silences tonight.
Reece goes completely still, not the relaxed stillness of a good session, but the held, tactical stillness of someone assessing a situation.
I’ve seen him do it. He processes quickly, which I’ve always appreciated and appreciate more than ever right now.
“Can he see in?” he says.
“From the street, yes. The front desk is visible through the window.” I’m already moving, not running, no sudden movements, nothing that would read as panic from outside. I walk to the front desk, take my place behind it, and open a design folder.
Normal.
Working late.
Alone.
“The chair,” I say.
“I know.”
Reece stays down.
I look up through the window without lifting my head.
The truck is parked across the street. Not directly outside, but three spaces down, which means he may have come from the stadium direction rather than the apartment.
The engine is still running. Through the windshield, I can make out his shape, the familiar set of those shoulders, and the tilt of the head, but he is looking at the studio.
My father is not a man who idles outside buildings for no reason.
He drives with intention and parks with purpose, and the only reason he would be here at eight forty-seven on a Tuesday night is either coincidence or the particular instinct he has always had to head off situations he wants to avoid.
I have been inside that instinct my entire life and know exactly how it works.
I keep my eyes on the folder.
Behind me, the studio is quiet. Reece doesn’t make a sound. I don’t look back at him because if my father sees my face, he’ll read it, and my face isn’t doing what I need it to right now.
The truck doesn’t move.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
I turn a page in the folder. Pretend to study it.
The design I’m looking at is a Celtic knot I drew six months ago and could reconstruct from memory, but right now it’s the most fascinating piece of artwork I’ve ever seen, and I am a professional studying her work alone in her studio on a Tuesday evening.
My phone is in my back pocket. I consider it.
If he comes in, there’s nothing I can do.
Reece is shirtless on my tattoo chair with fresh ink on his ribs, and there is no version of that scene I can explain without explaining everything.
If he doesn’t come in, we’re fine. If he calls me, I answer, I sound normal, and end the call.
The variables are not in my favor.
Another thirty seconds.
The truck engine drops in pitch.
Pulls forward.
For one terrible second, I think he’s parking, but then the headlights swing out, he turns, moves down the street, and disappears.
I don’t move for a full ten seconds after the sound fades.
“He’s gone,” I say.
I hear Reece exhale.
I close the folder and walk back to my station on legs I’m not entirely confident in.
He’s sitting up, one arm resting across his knee, watching my face with the careful attention he usually keeps reserved for batters.
His shirt is still off. The tattoo on his ribs is three-quarters finished, the shading half-done, my machine sitting warm and idle on its stand.
“Are you okay?” he says.
“Fine.” I sit down on my stool, pick up a fresh pair of gloves, but set them down again.
“Ava.”
“I’m fine.” The words are steady, but the rest of me is not. I can feel my hands, and I’d rather not right now because the faint tremor in them would be legible to anyone paying attention, and Reece is always paying attention. “He drives by sometimes. It doesn’t mean he knows anything.”
“He parked for two minutes and stared at your studio.”
“He was probably looking for my car.”