“What can I get you?” she asked, looking at his face, but not really seeing it. Looking-without-seeing was a parlor trick she’d honed into a survival skill over the course of her marriage.

“Medium half-caff skim latté, please,” he ordered.

She felt him watching her brisk movements. She kept her eyes on her work, but she could sense his tension--as if he were a river of words barely contained, and she the dam whose integrity relied on silence.

“Elli,” he said, as if testing the feel of a new word in a foreign language. “Is that short for anything?”

She caught the reflection of her name tag in shiny stainless steel of the espresso machine.

Elli.

She hated the nickname. When she was small, her stepfather had insisted upon it. He’d thought her given name was too old-fashioned. In this, as in all things, her mother had taken her new husband’s direction.

Throughout her childhood the nickname had tangled around her like winding sheets, her idea of self as dead as the father who’d named her.

“Elspeth,” she muttered, steaming the milk for his drink.

“Elspeth. I like that,” he said warmly. “It’s unusual. Lovely.”

Tears prickled in her eyes and in the bridge of her nose.

“Thank you,” she replied quietly.

“That’s a Scottish name, isn’t it?”

She nodded, spooning the foam over the top. His attempts at casual conversation unnerved her.