Chapter 1 - The Table by the Window
I've been a waitress long enough to know that every table is the same table.
Couples on first dates, couples on last dates, businessmen who never look up from their phones.
So when I saw the man in the navy suit sitting by the window with a baby balanced on his knee, I did what I always do.
I straightened my vest, put on my smile, and walked over.
"Good evening, can I get you something to drink?"
He looked up at me, and the little girl turned her face toward me at the same time.
That's when my heart stopped.
Blonde hair.
Blue eyes, wide open, staring straight at me like she'd been waiting for me all day.
I know those eyes.
I see them every time I close my own.
Because I gave birth to this child one year ago, and they told me I'd never see her again.
The baby raised one small arm toward me, fingers opening and closing.
Then her hand found mine, and those tiny fingers wrapped around two of mine and held on.
I didn't move.
I couldn't.
"She never lets strangers touch her, only her mother."
The father said it quietly, almost to himself, and I heard something underneath the words that I couldn't name yet.
I looked down at our hands on the white tablecloth, hers so small against mine, and I felt my face start to do things I couldn't control.
A smile that kept breaking.
Eyes that wouldn't stay dry.
I've served hundreds of tables in the year since I lost her.
I've smiled through worse than this.
But not this.
Not her.
He was watching me now.
I could feel it before I made myself look up.
Dark hair, a tattoo at the left side of his neck, another across the back of his right hand, and eyes that didn't miss much.
"Then why is she looking at you like that?"
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
What was I supposed to say?
That the baby in his arms had my chin and my mother's nose?
That I'd spent twelve months in a city two states away, then drifted right back here, taking a job at this restaurant because I'd once heard his family dined here?
That I'd been looking for her in every stroller, every high chair, every blue-eyed little girl for a year?
He was still studying my face, and I realized with a cold drop in my stomach that he wasn't just confused.
He was close to something.
Men like this one don't ask questions twice.
They get answers.
I pulled my hand back, gently, the way you'd take your hand out of a fire, and I heard the baby make a small sound of protest.
"I'll, um — I'll put in your drink order."
My voice came out wrong, thin and shaking.
I turned and walked toward the bar as fast as I could without running.
Behind me, I could feel his eyes on my back the whole way.
And I could hear that little girl starting to fuss, a rising, broken-hearted cry that I knew in my bones, because I'd heard it once before.
Through a door, down a hallway, on the worst day of my life.
My name is Claire Bennett.
I'm twenty-nine years old, I wait tables at Whitmore's on Fifth, and the man at the window table is holding my daughter.
He just doesn't know it yet.
Or maybe, God help me, he was starting to.
