Dumping My Ex For His Uncle novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: The Needle

"Consulting on what?" I said.

"On losing." Bram took a picture of the wire with his phone, then another. "An insurer doesn't pay the other side's lawyers six hundred thousand dollars for advice."

"Then I'm taking it to the firm tomorrow. I'm putting it on Joan's desk."

"And she'll say it was a fee for expert work, and it'll be shredded by noon." He folded the sheet back along its crease. "Paper like this needs a reason behind it. Right now we don't know what they sold."

For three days I worked nights on the Resolute and didn't sleep much.

On Thursday night I came down to the shop at ten.

Tilly was asleep upstairs.

The artists had gone home.

Bram was alone at the counter, inking a sketch of a heron, with the radio on low.

"I want a tattoo," I said.

He looked up slowly.

"You've wanted a tattoo for six years," he said. "Or you've wanted one since Tuesday?"

"How do you know I've wanted one for six years?"

"You looked at my arm at your wedding for longer than you looked at the cake."

I'd always wanted one, and Ellis had always said I'd regret it in a cocktail dress.

I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture.

My father on the deck of the Resolute in 1998, squinting into the sun, the boat behind him with her fat black fenders and red wheelhouse.

"Her," I said. "On my shoulder. The back of it. Where I can't see it, but I know it's there."

He looked at the picture a long time.

Then he pulled a sheet of paper toward him and started drawing.

When he turned it around forty minutes later, it was the Resolute exactly, small enough to fit under my palm, with a thin line of water under her bow and one gull.

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