You talked to her so she knew she wasn’t alone. He paused. That’s not nothing. That’s not almost enough. That’s what a person does for someone they love. Sophie looked at the table. I didn’t call anyone. At the end, when she got really bad, I should have called someone, but she told me not to. She wanted to be home, and I listened to her. A pause.
I was scared they’d take me away. Sophie, he said, and then, because he didn’t have a better way to say it, you were a little kid in an impossible situation. You did what you could. That’s all any person can do. She looked up at him. Her eyes in the low light were exactly his eyes. And they were full of something that was not quite tears, but was the reservoir behind tears.
The place where grief accumulates before it spills. I miss her, she said a lot. All the time. Even when things are good here, I miss her. I know, he said. That doesn’t go away. I don’t think it should go away. She was your mother. You’re supposed to miss her. The kettle clicked. He made her tea, the kind she’d decided she liked in recent weeks, chamomile with honey, and put it in front of her.
And she wrapped her hands around the mug. “Can I ask you something?” Sophie said. “Yeah.” “Do you think she would have told you about me?” eventually. He thought about it honestly because she deserved honesty. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think she might have when she got sick. I think a version of what happened is that she was planning to and then she ran out of time.
He paused. I think she was a person who made a decision and then had to live with it. And that’s a hard thing to live with. Sophie was quiet for a moment. I think she would have, she said. I think she was scared, but I think she would have. He nodded. She would have liked this, Sophie said then, looking around the kitchen, the worn table, the coffee maker, the orchard dark outside the window.
She would have liked that it’s a real place. She always wanted She talked about wanting a garden and space. She grew up in apartments. There’s room here, Ethan said. If you ever wanted to plant something. Sophie looked at him. In spring? In spring? He said. She drank her tea. He drank his coffee. He’d made himself coffee because at 3:00 in the morning there was no pretending it was a tea situation for him.
And the kitchen was warm and outside the January night was cold and clear and full of stars. And they sat together in the quiet of it until Sophie’s eyes started to close and he said, “Come on.” And walked her back upstairs and she paused at the door to her room and said, “Thanks.” and went in.
He stood in the hallway for a moment. Victoria’s door was open a crack, not the way it had been in the beginning. That had been her door, set to its default. This was open in the deliberate way a door is left open by someone who is awake and has been listening. He stood there in the dark hallway between the two doors, and understood something he hadn’t quite articulated to himself before.
that Victoria Langford, who had entered his life as a favor and a legal strategy and a desperate measure, had become something he did not have a clean word for. Not a friend exactly, that was too small, not a partner in the transactional sense, something in the room between categories, something that had grown in the dark and the cold and the daily accumulation of honest moments.
And he was standing in the hallway at 3:00 a.m. being made aware of it. He went back to bed. He didn’t sleep for a while. February brought a thaw that was temporary and deceptive, the way February thaws always were, and then brought back the cold with emphasis. It brought also the 30-day follow-up with Patricia Osman, which went well.
Sophie’s grades were solid. The counseling sessions with Dr. Hail had moved from strategic non-participation to something more genuine. The household, by all visible measures, was functioning. Patricia Osman wrote her report and told them the permanent guardianship hearing was now being scheduled for spring.
What February also brought was the illness. It started with Sophie coming home from school on a Thursday looking slightly wrong. Not dramatically wrong, not the wrong that announces itself, but the subtle wrongness of a person whose color is off and whose energy is lower than usual. Ethan noticed it at pickup and said nothing, watching.
By dinner, she’d barely touched her food and had dark circles under her eyes that hadn’t been there that morning. “Are you feeling okay?” he said. “I’m fine,” she said with the reflexive firmness of someone who has spent a lot of time not wanting to be a burden. “Sophie, I’m a little tired.” He put his hand on her forehead, the instinctive parental gesture that he hadn’t known he knew how to do, had apparently always known because it was just a hand on a forehead and her forehead was hot.
Not slightly warm. Hot. You’ve got a fever, he said. I don’t feel sick, she said. That’s what a fever does. He took his hand away. Come on upstairs. She argued about this with the specific energy of a sick child who doesn’t want to be sick, that she was fine, that she had homework, that she wasn’t that tired.
He stood his ground quietly and walked her upstairs and got her settled in bed with a glass of water and a thermometer, which read 103.2, which made him sit down on the edge of her bed for a moment and recalibrate. “That’s high,” Victoria said from the doorway. She’d come upstairs when she heard the thermometer beep. I know, he said.
Has she had Tylenol? Just got it. He gave Sophie the Tylenol and she took it with the resigned compliance of someone who has given up the argument and he pulled the extra blanket up and she lay there with Humphrey and her eyes went to the ceiling. I don’t like being sick, she said. Nobody does. When I was sick at home, when mom was sick, I couldn’t be sick. There wasn’t. She stopped.
