“No?”
“I try pretty hard to stay disconnected when I’m not working.” She gestured toward the water with her coffee. “No cable. No TikTok. My Instagram mostly exists so customers know I’m not a scammer with fins. If a headline can’t swim up and bite me, I probably miss it.”
“That sounds peaceful.”
“It sounds peaceful because you didn’t see me try to pay a parking ticket online last month.”
“But mostly?”
“Mostly, yeah.” She glanced toward the speaker as the chorus lifted over the beach. “I know her songs, though. A lot of them.”
“Then you’ve seen her somewhere.”
“I honestly don’t think I have.”
I looked at her before I could stop myself.
“You don’t know what Savannah Brooks looks like?”
“Nope.”
She said it with maddening ease, as if she had not just moved several important pieces of furniture inside my chest.
“I know her voice,” Ellie continued. “I know I like it. That’s enough.”
For several seconds, the beach seemed to quiet around the song.
People kept talking. Silverware kept clinking. Gary was still failing to stand beside the palm tree in an acceptable way.
But all I could hear was Ellie Parker saying she knew my voice without knowing my face.
I had spent almost a decade being watched.
Analyzed. Photographed. Frozen mid-blink in screenshots. Ranked on lists written by people who had never met me. Praised for authenticity in interviews where I had answered questions from a page of approved talking points.
And here was Ellie, who had heard me.
Only me.
Without any idea she was sharing a haunted picnic table with the woman singing through the speakers.
“Why?” she asked.
I blinked. “Why what?”
“Why are you staring at me like I’ve confessed to insurance fraud?”
“I’m surprised.”
“That I don’t know what a singer looks like?”
“That you don’t want to.”
Ellie shrugged, and the wetsuit slipped lower on one shoulder.
“I like the music. I don’t need the rest of it. Besides, famous people always look tired.”
The laugh that came out of me had a slight edge.
