The lobby I’m vacating is all marble and gray steel. Piper's place, by contrast, is warm light and bright color. There are silks draped over chairs, a whiteboard covered in her shorthand, two half-drunk mugs of tea, a sample centerpiece on the kitchen table that she's using as a fruit bowl.
It smells like her vanilla candles and whatever she made for breakfast.
She opens the door already holding a mug out to me.
"He asked about the lock on my front door for seven full minutes," she says by way of greeting. "I feel like I've been audited."
I take the mug and step inside and immediately hear him.
"—but if you turn it the other way it's different," Nico is saying, from somewhere near the entryway.
"That means it's locked all the way. pippy?” He calls Piper, pippy. We're both tired of correcting him. “pippy, you hear me?"
"Every word, bug," Piper calls back.
He appears around the corner then, in his little jeans and the yellow shirt we'd agreed on after the blue shirt, holding a set of Piper's spare keys like a toy.
Some kids want action figures. Mine throws his away. Give him a key and toy cars and he'll be alright.
When he sees me his whole face lights up.
"Mama!"
He runs at me full speed and I crouch to catch him. He hits my arms with his full four-year-old weight, smelling like maple syrup and crayon wax, and I hold him tighter than the moment probably calls for.
"My baby," I say into his hair. “How are you?”
"You took so long."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Did you find the car?"
"I will, when we get home."
He pulls back to look at my face, and this is the moment that gets me, every time.
The moment he looks at me with those soft-gray eyes. The same exact shade as that stranger in Venice, now my boss.
"Your shirt is all brown," Nico says seriously, looking at my blouse with the toddler equivalent of terrible concern.
"I know right? I spilled coffee by mistake."
He considers this. "Oh." Then, accepting it completely: "Pippy said more cartoons if you say yes."
I grin, tickling him. "I say yes." Growling playfully, he giggles, wriggling free, and bounds back in.
When I stand upright, Piper is looking at me with worry.
“I googled him,” she says, as we drop onto the couch beside me while Nico watches his cartoon from the floor, cross-legged, the spare keys still in his lap, turning them over in his small hands.
“Yeah?”
She says nothing for a while, eyes focused on Nico. Then, quietly: "I see it."
I sigh. "Told you."
"The eyes especially."
