Easton
1458 Words
He dropped her three blocks from an address she gave him without explaining it
The office was quiet when he got back. Six-fifteen.
He sat in his chair. He looked at his desk.
He'd noticed.
He noticed everything about her and that was the problem because he noticed a lot of things about a lot of people.
He couldn't remember the last time noticing a person felt like this.
He pulled his laptop toward him.
He opened a search window.
*Aurora Wells Photography Los Angeles.*
Clean website. Good work, really good work, actually. The kind of eye that couldn't be taught.
He clicked through the portfolio slowly. Architecture, events, documentary-style portraits. A restraint to all of it that matched the way she moved through a space.
Minimal social media. Almost nothing personal. A woman who understood the value of being unseen.
He sat back.
The feeling was back, the specific one from the event, from the car, from every moment she'd been within ten feet of him and his brain had kept reaching for something it couldn't locate.
Like a file that existed somewhere in his memory but had been moved without his knowledge.
He knew her.
He was certain of it in the way he was certain of things that mattered, not loudly, not with evidence, just bone-deep and immovable.
He picked up his phone and called his assistant.
Diane picked up on the second ring.
"I need a background check," he said. "Standard. Professional history, prior addresses, any public record." He paused. "Name is Aurora Wells. Photographer. Based in LA."
"Timeline?" Diane said.
"Tomorrow morning."
"Done." A pause, the kind that meant Diane had something. She always had something. "Anything specific you're looking for?"
"Start with family," he said.
He ended the call.
He looked at the portfolio on his screen for a moment longer than he needed to.
Then he closed the laptop and went home.
He told himself it was professional curiosity.
He was a significantly better liar than Aurora Wells.
The next morning Diane placed a single manila folder on his desk at seven-forty-five.
"It's thin," she said. "Deliberately thin." She set a coffee beside it. "Which is interesting"
He opened it after she left.
“Aurora Elaine Wells. 28. Los Angeles, CA. Relocated nine years ago from Austin, Texas.”
He stopped.
Austin.
He read it again. Slower.
“Austin, Texas.”
Something moved in his chest.
He kept reading. Freelance photography, established client base, no criminal record, no litigation, no debt beyond the ordinary.
Previous address in Austin listed as a residential property registered to one “Graham Ellis Wells.”
Graham Wells.
He sat back in his chair.
He knew that name. He knew exactly where he knew it from the investment approach six weeks before the launch, the third-party contact, the offer.
He'd had his lawyer flag it. He'd turned it down the same day.
Graham Wells had tried to buy access to his company.
Three weeks later, Aurora Wells had walked into his event.
He read the file to the end.
No mention of a husband. No mention of family beyond the father.
He flipped back to the beginning.
“Relocated nine years ago.”
Nine years.
He sat with that number and the specific texture of it and the thing his brain kept reaching for that he still couldn't find.
Nine years ago he'd been in Austin.
He’d fallen for a nineteen year old Aurora.
He closed the folder.
He didn't call her.
That was a conscious decision, made and re-made several times over the following three days. He had what he needed professionally.
Sophie had confirmed the photos were exactly what they wanted, delivery received, invoice paid. There was no professional reason for contact.
He thought about her anyway.
That was less of a conscious decision.
In the middle of a board meeting he'd catch himself thinking about the way she'd looked.
At his desk he'd pull the portfolio up and then catch himself and close it, and then twenty minutes later open it again.
It was a Thursday when he saw them.
He was on his way back from a site visit, he was reaching for his phone to check the time.
And then he saw her.
She was on the sidewalk outside a small independent bookstore. He almost didn't clock her immediately, she was just a figure, dark jacket, camera bag on one shoulder.
But something made him look. The same something that had been looking for her for three days without his permission.
He slowed the car.
She wasn't alone.
There was a child beside her. A girl, small, maybe eight or nine, wearing a red jacket and carrying a book with both hands like it was something precious.
She was saying something, face tilted up toward Aurora, and the energy between them was the specific unmistakable energy of a mother and a child who trusted each other completely.
Aurora was looking down at her with an expression Easton had not seen on her face in any of their interactions.
Unguarded.
Fully, completely unguarded. Like whoever she was when no one required anything from her.
She laughed at something the girl said.
He'd been trying to hear that laugh for two days without knowing it.
He sat at the wheel with the car barely moving and watched Aurora crouch down to the girl's level, pointing at something in the book.
The girl grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the bookstore door, and Aurora let herself be pulled, smiling in a way that rearranged something in his chest.
They disappeared inside.
He sat there for another moment.
Then traffic moved and he moved with it and he was two blocks away before he fully came back to himself.
He thought about her while on call. Thought about her through a dinner he ate alone at his kitchen island. Thought about her at eleven-fifteen when he should have been asleep and was instead staring at the ceiling doing the thing he'd decided not to do.
The girl.
Maybe eight or nine.
Red jacket. Book in both hands. The way she'd looked up at Aurora completely comfortable, completely safe, like Aurora was the whole of the world she needed.
He thought about relocated nine years ago.
He thought about Austin.
He told himself to stop.
He told himself there was a completely ordinary explanation and he was a man who dealt in evidence not in…
His phone lit up on the nightstand.
Unknown number.
He stared at it.
It buzzed again.
He answered.
Silence on the line.
Then a voice he didn't recognize. Male. Smooth. Measured in the specific way of people who were paid to be measured.
"Mr. Cole." A pause. "I think it's time we had a conversation. About Aurora Wells." Another pause. "And about what she hasn't told you yet."
Easton sat up slowly.
"Who is this?" he said.
The voice didn't answer the question.
"There's a paternity document," it said. "Filed nine years ago in Austin, Texas. Your name is on it." A long, deliberate silence. "So is hers."
The room was very quiet.
"And Mr. Cole?" The voice dropped lower. "The child you saw today on Elmwood Street…"
Easton went completely still.
"She wasn't just a coincidence."
The call went dead.
He sat in the dark for a long time.
His hands, he noticed, were completely steady.
But his heart was doing something it had never done before.
Not fear.
Not anger.
Something older than both of those things. Something that had no name yet but was pressing against the inside of his chest like it had been waiting a very long time to exist.
He looked at the blank screen of his phone.
Then he opened his contacts.
Found the name.
And called Diane.
"I need everything," he said, when she picked up. "Not the standard package. Everything." He paused. "And Diane find out who filed a paternity document in Austin, Texas, nine years ago with my name on it."
Silence.
"Easton." Diane's voice, for the first time in four years of working together, had lost its professional neutrality. Just slightly. Just enough to tell him she understood the weight of what he'd just said. "Are you alright?”
He looked at the ceiling.
He thought about a girl in a red jacket holding a book with both hands.
He thought Aurora who had walked into his event and looked at him like she'd seen a ghost.
"Get me the document," he said.
He ended the call.
Outside, the city moved in its indifferent way.
And somewhere across it, in a house he didn't know the address of, a little girl named Nova was asleep.
Not knowing.
Not yet.
- Writer
