Wren wrote the letters below the wave on Nina’s sketch in a script so small and delicate it looked like the ocean was just whispering his name.
“Perfect,” Nina said.
Claire went first because even though she was the most nervous, she believed that going first was just getting it over with. And getting it over with was the way that Claire moved through life without losing her mind.
She sat in the chair with focused intensity, as if undergoing a medical procedure, which was not entirely wrong.
Wren cleaned the spot on her inner ankle, put the stencil on, and picked up the machine. Claire grabbed Nina’s hand so hard that Nina actually winced.
“How much have you done?” Claire asked, staring at the ceiling.
“Um, I haven’t started yet,” Wren said, laughing.
“Oh.”
The needle touched her skin, and Claire made a sound like a polite person being electrocuted. She gripped Nina’s hand even tighter. Her jaw locked. Her eyes remained on the ceiling as if she were waiting for angels to come down and take her to the clouds.
“Breathe,” Wren said calmly.
Claire breathed.
The needle hummed, and Harper watched from the next chair.
Claire Morrison, who organized napkins and baked pound cake and counted to three before speaking to her own husband, was sitting in a chair, allowing a stranger to permanently mark her body.
She was obviously terrified and doing it anyway. It only took about twelve minutes. When Wren finished, she wiped it clean and held up a mirror.
Claire looked at the small wave on her ankle, and a small smile appeared on her face. She was looking at the first thing she had really done for herself in twenty-six years that nobody had asked her to do or needed her to do.
It existed purely because she had chosen it.
“It’s so tiny,” Claire said.
“It’s all yours,” Wren said.
Nina went next. She was very calm in the chair, actually calmer than anyone expected. The needle traced the wave, then the initials. Nina watched the whole thing, eyes watching the ink go into her skin.
When Wren finished, Nina ran her thumb gently over the bandage.
“He’s going to be on me forever now.”
“He was always with you,” Harper said. “Now it’s just visible on your skin.”
Then it was Harper’s turn. She sat in the chair. Wren cleaned the inside of her left wrist, the place where her pulse lived, and Harper watched the stencil go on.
She thought about the careful, controlled decisions, every careful, controlled decision she’d made in her last twenty years. The career that she’d built. The apartment with no kitchen table.
The man she’d pushed away because loving him meant needing him, and needing someone was definitely a liability she couldn’t afford.
The needle started. It hurt, but not in the way Harper had expected. It was a bit sharp and specific, a focused kind of pain, but Harper found that she actually didn’t mind it.
She had spent so long avoiding discomfort of any kind that the honest sting of the needle felt almost like relief. The pain meant that something was happening.
She watched the wave appear on her wrist, small and permanent. When Wren was finished, Harper held her wrist up to the light.
The wave was dark against her clean skin, exactly the small, beautiful thing she would normally never allow herself to have.
She thought about her mother seeing it or her colleagues. She thought about Jordan, who had once told her she was the most closed-off person he’d ever loved.
