The Blonde with a Violin Tattoo - Richard Lowe

Annabelle is twenty-two years old, working the reception desk of a Dallas oil company, watching a clock that refuses to move, when a couple comes through the revolving door and kisses in the lobby at 10:47 on a Tuesday morning. Something shifts. What follows is a year.

A year of learning what her body actually wants: through Chad, who gave her something without meaning to; James, who asked before he kissed her; David, who brought water without being asked and always wanted to know what she wanted; and Jerome, who observed her with precision and warmth and never quite got past the surface of her.

A year of the Rosaria's table, four women on Thursday nights who have been feeding each other wine and bread and honest opinions for long enough that catching bread without looking up is a developed skill.

A year that includes something that happens in a gallery corridor that she cannot bring herself to call what it was, and a night alone in a Deep Ellum club where she finds the edge of her own autonomy and what happens when someone engineers it away from you.

And underneath all of it: the violin tattoo on her back. Her late father's instrument, pressed permanently into her skin after four hours face down in a chair. Chosen pain. The right to carry it.

Annabelle has been managing herself into a shape other people could receive since she was nine years old, standing in a kitchen doorway watching something she wasn't supposed to see. This is the year she finds out what shape she actually is.

Explicit content. For adult readers who want literary fiction that does not look away.