That Touch of Ink Read Online Free PDF Page A

windowsill.
    I hopped in the shower, and then changed into a vintage peony-printed, full-skirted dress, draped a whisper-pink cardigan over my shoulders, and slid my feet into pale pink ballerina flats. Before I left, I took the envelope from inside Atomic Ranch out, wrote Attn: Night Company on the front of the envelope, and left a note about a new paint job on the back. I dropped the envelope into the secure metal rent drop-off box in the front of the building. At least it was out of my apartment.
    Brad was waiting for me by the bar inside the renovated Tiki restaurant. “I’m glad you called,” he said. He brushed my blonde hair away from my face. “You’re as beautiful as ever. Come here,” he said gently.
    He leaned forward and kissed me, and an electric shock snapped between us. I jerked away. I expected him to apologize for being forward. He didn’t.
    A thin gray-haired man in his sixties approached with two Mai Tais. He wore a Hawaiian shirt in shades of navy, orange, and yellow. A plastic nametag clipped to his collar had a piece of masking tape over it. Del had been written on it in black marker.
    Brad was startled by the waiter’s appearance. I took a glass and thanked him to cover for Brad’s odd behavior.
    “Don’t thank me, thank the gentleman who ordered for you.” He gestured to Brad and hovered by us for a moment. “We’re clearing a table for you now. It’ll just be a minute.”
    I thanked him again and took a sip of my drink.
    “I thought you had second thoughts,” Brad said.
    “I almost didn’t come,” I said. I didn’t know if I was going to tell him about the body at Paper Trail. I didn’t want to think about it, let alone talk about it. If anyone asked, I could make the argument that the only reason I showed up was because this was the one thing that had the potential to distract me.
    “So, Maddy, how are you? How have you been?”
    “Nobody calls me Maddy, Brad.”
    “I call you Maddy. Don’t you remember?”
    “I’ve tried to forget.”
    “I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I’m sorry a hundred times over.”
    “Come on, Brad, you can do better than that, can’t you?”
    He pulled the tortoiseshell frames from his face and polished the glass between the thin cashmere of his sweater. After putting them on, he focused on me.
    “If I were playing a game, I could. But this is for real, and I’ve missed you. More than I ever thought possible. Every single day I think about how I pushed you away, how I did it for your own safety. I’ve wondered if you knew that, or if you’d understand. Even when I took a job in Carmel, California, right after you left, I was still haunted by you. Didn’t help that the job was in Doris Day’s hotel. Hell, that’s probably why I took the job to begin with.”
    I tipped my head down and looked at my drink. Brad didn’t know that he had seen me while on that job in California. After getting out of the hospital, not sure where to go, I took a spontaneous getaway. The night he saw me, my hair had been stained to a temporary brown rinse and I’d worn a stranger’s clothes. It had been paralyzing. We’d been face-to-face and he hadn’t recognized me. That one fact had hurt as much as the break-up and the knee injury, and had been the tipping point between clinging to the emotional pain and shutting out the world and  moving forward.
    By the time I left Carmel by-the-Sea, I knew I had to start over. And I did. But I always wondered, if I really had been so important to him, why hadn’t he recognized me when I was right in front of him? Was it me he really wanted, or the package: the vintage dresses, the poufy blond hair, the Doris Day-lookalike, fifties chick that seemed to fit so well with his hipster dude image?
    “There are things about me you don’t know, Maddy, things I wish weren’t true. But you, you’re pure. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the way you look in those cute vintage dresses.”
    I cringed at how closely his words