Everyone's But Hers

Chapter 10: Three Blocks Away

Elena was at Mrs. Carla's door by seven fifteen.

She always was on shoot days. Drop-off before the light changed, pick-up by six, sometimes later if the job ran long and Mrs. Carla said it was fine, which Mrs. Carla always said because Mrs. Carla was seventy-one and claimed that children kept her joints from seizing up.

She knocked twice. The door opened on the second knock like it always did, like the person on the other side had been waiting right behind it.

"Mama."

Wren was four years old and approximately thirty pounds of pure forward motion. She hit Elena at the knees, arms locked around her legs, face pressed into her thigh, and Elena's whole chest did the thing it always did, the thing that never got smaller no matter how many mornings in a row it happened.

She reached down and picked her up.

Wren smelled like the strawberry shampoo Elena bought in bulk and like sleep, that specific warm heaviness that only existed on small children in the morning. She pressed her face into Elena's neck and made a sound that was not quite a word.

"I know," Elena said. "I missed you too."

"She was an angel," Mrs. Carla said from inside the apartment. She appeared in the doorway a second later, a cardigan, reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead, the small tortoiseshell cat she called Professor weaving around her ankles. "Ate all her dinner. Read her two books. Went down without a single argument."

"That's because she saves the arguments for me."

Mrs. Carla smiled. "She asked where you were."

"What did you tell her?"

"That you were working. She said Okay and went back to her puzzle." Mrs. Carla looked at Wren, who had now pulled back to study Elena's face with the focused intensity she applied to most things. "She's going to be like you, you know. Notices everything."

Wren patted Elena's cheek with one small hand. "You look tired," she said.

Mrs. Carla laughed.

Elena kissed the top of her daughter's head. "I'm fine, bug."

"Your eyes are small."

"Very observant. Thank you."

Wren considered this and then rested her head back on Elena's shoulder, satisfied. Case closed. The adult had been assessed and found acceptable.

They walked back down the hall to their own apartment. Wren rode on Elena's hip the way she had since she could hold her head up, one arm slung over Elena's shoulder, watching the hallway with the calm proprietary gaze of someone who had lived in this building her whole life and knew every crack in the plaster.

Inside, Nessa was already up. Coffee made, laptop open, one foot tucked under her on the couch. She looked up when they came in.

"Morning, Wren."

" Morning Nessa. Did you sleep here?"

"I did."

Wren absorbed this. "Okay." She wiggled down from Elena's hip and went to the corner of the living room where her things were, the low shelf Elena had built from a flat-pack kit that had taken four hours and most of her patience, the baskets of toys and the stack of board books and the stuffed rabbit named Biscuit who had lost one eye eight months ago and been restored with a mismatched button that Wren preferred to the original.

Elena poured herself coffee and stood at the counter.

Nessa looked at her over the rim of her mug. Not a question. Just looking.

"She slept fine," Elena said, like that was the thing Nessa had asked.

"Good."

A beat.

"I'm not thinking about it," Elena said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

Nessa went back to her laptop. "I was going to ask if we had any of that bread left."

Elena opened the cabinet. "No."

"Tragic."

Wren looked up from her corner. "What's tragic?"

"No bread," Nessa said.

Wren thought about this. "We could have crackers."

"That's very practical of you."

"I know," Wren said, and went back to her rabbit.

Elena drank her coffee. Outside the window the rain from last night was gone, the street damp and flat and catching the early light in long silver strips. It was going to be a good shooting day if she could get her head right. She had a corporate job at noon, architecture in the afternoon, nothing that required her to feel anything.

She could do that. She was good at that.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

She looked at it.

Unknown number. Not a text. A call and the area code was Los Angeles.

She let it ring.

It rang four times and went to voicemail. Ten seconds later, the voicemail notification came through, and then immediately after it, a text from the same number.

It's Kai. I know you don't have this number. I got yours from the agency directory. I'm sorry if that's overstepping.

She stared at it.

Then:

I talked to my lawyer this morning. The credit correction is in motion. Your name on the original registration, the streaming metadata, the physical release if we do one. It's not contingent on anything. I just wanted you to know.

She read it twice.

"Elena," Nessa said.

She looked up.

Nessa was watching her with the expression she used when she was being careful. "Your face."

"My face is fine."

"Your face is doing about six things."

Wren appeared at Elena's elbow. She had a biscuit tucked under one arm, and she was looking up at Elena with the same focused assessment she'd applied at the door. "Mama. Crackers?"

Elena put the phone down. She crouched to Wren's level, which put them almost eye to eye, and she looked at her daughter's face. The dark eyes that were all Elena. The line of the jaw that was not. The particular set of the mouth when she wanted something and was being patient about waiting for it.

She cupped Wren's face in both hands.

"Crackers," she confirmed.

Wren smiled. The full one, the one with the gap where she'd lost her first tooth two months ago. Elena felt it move through her chest like a current.

She stood up, got the crackers, and did not pick up her phone again.

But she did not delete the texts either.

And when Wren climbed into her lap twenty minutes later with Biscuit and a board book about a bear who couldn't find his hat, Elena read it twice without missing a single word and only thought about Kai Voss once.

Which was, all things considered, progress.

She was on the third reading when Wren looked up at her with the sudden focused attention of a four-year-old who had just remembered something important.

"Mama," she said. "Who's the man?"

Elena's hands went still on the book.

"What man, bug?"

"The man in the hall. Last night. I heard a man's voice." She said it simply, like a report. As she was describing the weather. "I was awake a little. I heard him talking."

Elena kept her face very still. "That was just someone visiting Nessa."

Wren looked at Nessa.

Nessa, to her considerable credit, did not flinch. "Yep," she said, without looking up from her laptop. "Very boring. Nobody important."

Wren considered this for approximately two seconds. Then she nodded and went back to the book.

"Bear finds his hat," she said, pointing at the last page.

"He does," Elena said. "He always does."

She turned the page.

And she told herself the tightness in her throat was just the morning. Just the bad sleep and the rain and the coffee and the way this city looked on days when the light came in sideways.

She told herself it had nothing to do with the man who had stood in her doorway last night and said I know it happened, and who did not know, could not know, that what he thought had happened was only half the story.

The smaller half.

The one she could almost live with.