ELLIOT
“She drew her a picture.”
Nicole said it before he sat down. She was already at the kitchen table when he arrived at nine, both hands around a mug, her hair down in a way he had rarely seen. Not the composed version. Not the version that walked into his house like she owned every room. Just a woman at a table at the beginning of a difficult conversation she had chosen not to avoid.
He sat across from her.
“Zara drew Sera a picture,” Nicole said again. She slid a piece of paper across the table without looking at him.
He looked at it.
Crayon. The careful, effortful lines of a five-year-old who was trying very hard. A woman with long dark hair and a yellow dress. A sun in the corner. At the bottom, in the unsteady letters of a child just learning to hold a pencil, one word.
Ser
