Chapter 4: The Whole Time
I didn't move for a moment.
Forty minutes.
Sophie had been asking about her mother for two years.
Drawing pictures of her at preschool.
Kissing a photograph goodnight.
Forty minutes away.
"What's the address?" I said.
"You can't just—"
"What is the address, Vanessa?"
"She didn't want to be found.
That was the whole point.
She made a choice—"
"She made a choice to abandon her daughter and fake her own de@th and you helped her do it and then you married me." I picked up the phone from the counter.
"I'm going to call the last number.
You can either tell me the address or I call and Sophie hears whatever Rachel says when she picks up."
Vanessa looked at Sophie.
Sophie looked back at her with those steady three-year-old eyes that missed nothing.
"Fine," Vanessa said.
She took the phone from my hand, opened the contacts, and read out an address in a town called Millhaven.
I typed it into my own phone.
Then I looked at her.
"You're going to stay here.
You're not going to call her.
You're not going to leave."
"You can't tell me what to do."
"I have footage of you pushing a three-year-old into a pool.
I have your call log.
I have eighteen calls to a woman who is legally de@d." I kept my voice flat.
"Stay here."
I carried Sophie to the car.
She was still in the towel.
I found a spare jacket in the back seat and wrapped it around her over the top.
"Where are we going, Daddy?"
I buckled her in.
"We're going for a drive."
"To find Mommy?"
I looked at her in the mirror.
Her hair was still damp.
Her eyes were completely serious.
"Maybe," I said.
She nodded like that was a reasonable answer and looked out the window.
I drove.
The GPS took me through two small towns and then out onto a long flat road with fields on both sides.
I kept checking the mirror.
No headlights following.
Vanessa had stayed.
I called my brother Daniel from the car.
"I need you to go to my house," I said when he picked up.
"What?
Why?
It's almost—"
"Vanessa is there.
I need someone there.
Don't let her leave and don't let her make calls.
Can you do that?"
A pause.
"What's going on?"
"I'll explain everything later.
Can you go right now?"
"Yeah," he said.
"I'm going.
Are you and Sophie okay?"
I looked in the mirror again.
Sophie was watching the fields go past.
"We're fine," I said.
"Go."
I hung up.
The GPS said eleven minutes.
I had been driving for twenty when I turned onto a gravel road and saw a small white house at the end of it.
One light on inside.
A car in the driveway I didn't recognize.
I sat in the car for a moment.
Two years.
A funeral.
A headstone.
Grief that had changed the shape of everything — how I slept, how I spoke to Sophie, why I had eventually, slowly, let Vanessa in.
All of it built on something that wasn't true.
Sophie had fallen asleep against the window.
I got out of the car quietly and walked to the front door.
I knocked.
Footsteps inside.
A pause — the kind of pause where someone looks through the peephole.
Then the door opened.
She looked exactly the same.
Thinner.
Hair shorter.
But her eyes — Sophie's eyes — were exactly the same.
Rachel looked at me and went completely white.
"Marcus," she whispered.
"Hello, Rachel," I said.
Behind me, I heard the car door open.
Sophie had woken up.
Rachel's eyes moved past my shoulder.
Her hand went to her mouth.
"Sophie," she breathed.
May you like
And Sophie, standing on the gravel in an oversized jacket with her hair still damp from the pool, said the only word she'd been saving for two years:
"Mommy."
