My skin prickled.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
She kept staring.
Then she laughed nervously.
It sounded forced.
“Maybe it was always there.”
“No.”
“You could have missed it.”
“I didn’t.”
Her eyes met mine in the mirror.
For half a second, I saw panic.
Then it vanished.
“Maybe the sun brought it out.”
“A birthmark?”
“Or a skin spot. I don’t know, Victor.”
Her voice sharpened.
“I just got home. Can we not turn this into something weird?”
I backed off.
But that evening, while she was in the kitchen, I pulled up old photographs.
Our honeymoon in Costa Rica, a trip to Lake Michigan, and a wedding in Florida, where Alma wore a backless dress.
There was no mark. Not even a shadow.
When I showed her, she became very quiet.
“I’ll see a dermatologist. Maybe it is a mole that is developing,” she said.
That should have reassured me, but it didn’t.
Over the next few days, the small inconsistencies kept coming.
She stopped putting cinnamon in her coffee, even though she had done it every morning since we met.
She pushed away a plate of mushroom pasta and said, “You know I hate mushrooms.”
Alma loved mushrooms.
