Chapter 4 - Sophia's House
Sophia Reyes had grown up believing three true things about her origins: that her birth mother had been young and unable to care for her, that her adoptive parents — Eleanor and Marcus Reyes, both gone now, buried in the same cemetery outside Baton Rouge where Sophia had scattered flowers every spring for a decade — had loved her without reservation, and that the identity of her birth mother would remain, forever, an unopened door.
She had never gone looking. That was the truth she found hardest to explain to Michael, on the nights after the pageant when he asked, gently, why she hadn't simply thrown the letters away and said nothing.
"Because some doors open themselves," she told him, standing at the window of the apartment they'd leased together downtown, string lights from the balcony next door blinking against the glass. "And once they do, you can't very well pretend you didn't see the light coming through."
Michael sat on the arm of the sofa, tie loosened, looking older than his forty-one years in the low lamp light. He had not slept well since the pageant. Claire had texted him twice — brief, businesslike messages about pickup times that both of them understood were placeholders for a conversation neither was ready to have.
"Do you regret it?" he asked. "Telling her?"
Sophia considered the question honestly, the way she considered most things — she was a woman who weighed her words the way a jeweler weighs stones, turning them in the light before deciding their worth.
"No," she said finally. "I regret the timing. I regret that it happened in a church hallway with children fifty feet away. But I don't regret that Claire knows. She deserves to know where she comes from. So do I."
"Even if it changes things? Between you and me?"
Sophia turned from the window. "Michael. I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually think about the answer instead of giving me the one you think I want."
He straightened. "Okay."
"When you look at Claire now — knowing what we know — do you feel anything different?"
"She's the mother of my children," Michael said carefully. "Of course I feel something. I always have."
"That's not what I asked."
The silence that followed lasted long enough that Sophia had her answer before he spoke again.
"I loved her for a long time," Michael admitted. "And then I stopped being in love with her, somewhere around year seven, and I didn't know how to say that out loud without it sounding like a betrayal of everything we'd built. So I let the marriage die slowly instead of ending it honestly. That's on me. That's always been on me." He looked up. "But that was three years ago, Sophia. I'm not — whatever you're afraid of, I'm not standing at some crossroads wondering if I made a mistake divorcing her."
"I'm not afraid of that," Sophia said, though the small catch in her voice suggested otherwise. "I'm afraid of what happens to me in all this. I spent thirty-four years without a sister. I find out I have one four weeks before I'm supposed to marry her ex-husband, in the same small town, sharing the same two children at every birthday and graduation and Christmas for the rest of our lives. Michael, do you understand what that means? If Claire and I actually do this — if we actually become sisters, in any real sense — I will spend every holiday of my life watching my sister's children call another woman 'Mom,' knowing I could have been their aunt without any of this complication. Instead I'm going to be their stepmother and their aunt at the same time, and I don't know if there's a name for what that makes me, or if there's a rulebook for how to do it without breaking something in all of us."
Michael crossed the room and took her hands. "We'll figure it out. Together."
But even as he said it, Sophia heard the hollowness underneath — the sound of a man reciting comfort he didn't fully believe, because some part of him, she suspected, hadn't figured out anything at all. Not about the sisters. Not about the past. And, she was beginning to fear, not about his own heart, which had perhaps never fully closed the door on Claire Hastings that either of them had convinced themselves it had.
She didn't say this out loud. Not yet. Instead she squeezed his hands and said only, "I want to meet her again. Properly. Not at a pageant, not by accident. I want to sit down with Claire and ask her the questions I've been carrying for three weeks."
"When?"
"Tomorrow," Sophia said. "Before Christmas gets any closer and this becomes something we're trying to solve in front of the children instead of before it ever reaches them."
May you like
Michael nodded slowly. Outside, snow had begun to fall in earnest, dusting the balcony rail, the string lights blurring into soft halos through the frosted glass. Somewhere across town, in a yellow house on Larkspur Lane, Claire Hastings sat awake at her kitchen table with the same folder open before her, and neither woman — not yet — understood that the hardest part of the story wasn't the secret at all.
It was what they would each choose to do, now that the secret was out.
