She had her father's hands.
That was what people always said — the aunts, the neighbors, the women at her mother's church who pinched cheeks and smelled like powder and spoke in that particular tone reserved for children who didn't belong to them. She has her father's hands. Long fingers, wide palms, the kind of hands that looked like they were built for something specific even if nobody could agree on what. Her mother said it like a compliment. Her father said it like a fact. She had spent most of her sixteen years not thinking about it at all.
She thought about it now because she was looking at her hands in the bathroom mirror, toothbrush in one, foam at the corner of her mouth, seven forty three in the morning light coming through the frosted window above the sink, and her hands looked completely ordinary to her. Just hands. Doing what hands did.
