Chapter 3 — Taylor
Her daughter had always been like this.
Other people’s children pointed at candy and cartoon characters.
Taylor pointed at people — at the man on the bus who was pretending not to cry, at the woman in the grocery line counting coins twice, at the neighbor whose smile, Taylor announced once at full volume, “doesn’t go up to her eyes.” She noticed.
She had noticed since before she could really talk, and it unnerved adults, who are used to being read only by other adults and never expect to be seen straight through by someone who still needs help with buttons.
Adrienne had worried about it when Taylor was smaller — had wondered whether her daughter’s habit of announcing people’s hidden feelings in public was something to gently train out of her, the way you train a child not to point.
But she had never been able to do it, because the thing Taylor did was not rudeness.
It was a kind of attention most people lose somewhere around the age of six, when they learn it’s safer to accept the surface a person offers than to notice what moves underneath it.
Taylor hadn’t learned that yet.
She still looked at someone and simply saw them — not the clothes or the money or the story they told about themselves, but the actual weather of them, the sadness or fear or kindness under the skin.
Adrienne had come to think of it not as a phase to correct but as a gift to protect, for as long as the world would let her daughter keep it.
An hour earlier, while Adrienne was stacking trays in the kitchen, Taylor had slipped away down the long carpeted hall.
She had pressed her palm to the cold floor-to-ceiling glass and looked at the black ocean far below.
She had reached up to touch the throat of an orchid taller than she was.