A Slight Smile Is Very Charming on a Stone Face novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Thirty Seconds

Tobias reads three true things off her face in the elevator, and when she asks what her face says right now he draws it on a napkin.

"You drew a smile I never made," I said.

"I drew the one you were about to make."

"That is not a thing."

"It is for me."

He said it mildly, as if he were telling me his shoe size.

The courtroom around us was empty except for a bailiff stacking chairs at the back.

I put my phone in my pocket and crossed my arms.

"Explain it."

He turned the sketchbook so I could see the page.

It was covered in tiny faces, a dozen to a sheet, each one done in a few lines.

"I draw trials," he said. "A face changes in seconds, and a judge gives me one spot to sit in."

"So I stopped drawing what a face looks like," he said.

"What do you draw?"

"Where it's going. Faces start moving before the person knows. The eyes go first, then the cheek, then the mouth."

He tapped the corner of my sketch's eye.

"Yours went first. Then your breathing changed, like a small laugh you swallowed. I had time to draw it."

"I was on the stand giving testimony about a fire."

"You were looking at the defense lawyer's tie."

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

The lawyer had worn a brown tie covered in tiny yellow ducks.

I had noticed them when he asked me if I had ever felt sorry for a claimant in my whole career.

I had a perfectly good answer to that, and at that exact moment I had been thinking about the ducks.

"Forty seconds later it happened," Tobias said. "For about one second. The left corner of your mouth moved a quarter inch. Nobody else was looking."

"But you were."

"I'm always looking. It's a problem."

I should have been angry.

I had a manager waiting for an explanation and a city that had seen my face on the news.

Instead I heard myself say, "Nobody has ever seen that. My own father says he can't tell if I'm laughing."

He looked at me with those hazel eyes, and he did not say sorry.

"It's there," he said. "It's just small."

The bailiff cleared his throat, and we took the hint.

We rode the elevator down together.

It was an old one with a brass panel and a mirror on the back wall, and neither of us looked at the mirror.

"I'll tell you three things," he said. "You can tell me if I'm wrong."

"I'd like to hear them."

"You're not angry about the drawing. You're embarrassed."

I said nothing.

"You walked fast to get here. You were out of breath at the door and you held it in."

"I walked nine minutes."

"And you're not scared of the news. You're scared of your boss."

The elevator dinged on the lobby, and neither of us moved.

All three were right.

I looked at his face, which was open and easy to read.

He was not smug.

He seemed, if anything, a little worried that he had said too much.

"Come on," he said. "I owe you a coffee, and I can answer the rest better with something warm in my hands."

The cafeteria in the courthouse basement smells like soup and floor wax.

He bought two coffees and sat across from me at a small orange table.

I held mine in both hands and made myself ask.

"What does my face say right now?"

"You want the real answer?"

"I want to see it."

He pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and took a stub of charcoal from his jacket.

He drew for maybe twenty seconds, looking at me and then at the napkin, never at both for long.

I held still.

It felt strange to be looked at that carefully by someone who was not trying to decide anything.

He slid the napkin across the table.

It was a young woman with her hair at her jaw and her mouth in a straight line.

Her brows were drawn very slightly together, and her eyes were wide.

She looked worried and a little hopeful.

I stared at it.

I had been told all my life that I looked bored, angry, or like I was judging a room.

Nobody had ever told me I looked like this.

"That's not me," I said.

"That's you at ten past nine on a Wednesday," Tobias said. "Is it wrong?"

My throat did something I could not stop.

"No," I said. "It isn't wrong."

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