Chapter 14

“A re you ready?” I asked. She seemed ready, so I let go of her little fists and moved my hands away. “Ta da!”

Everyone clapped and there were some cheers, and Esme clapped, too. Then she lost her balance and she sat down on her little butt in a leaf pile I’d built behind her to provide a soft landing spot. The moment was over but they had all been able to see her stand on her own, and Jude had gotten several pictures. She took off crawling but I scooped her up and kissed her tummy, and she laughed her head off.

“It seems very advanced to me,” I heard Granger tell his fiancée—almost his wife, now. It was getting closer and closer to their wedding date and the preparations were in a final, everything-is-crazy stage, but Addie was handling it very well.

“She’s obviously a genius,” she agreed with him, and I nodded. Obviously.

My mom held out her hands, smiling at her granddaughter, and I passed over the baby. “Esme, can you stand up on your own? What a big girl you are!” she said, and Esme smiled back. She did love her grandma, who would be, we’d recently been informed, called only “Baba.” I thought it was because it had been the baby’s favorite thing to say, so Mom had adopted it as her moniker. I’d been trying to teach Esme to say “Sophie”—not mama, which was sometimes hard to hear.

“Baba” was unusual but fine. I was just glad that my mother had (mostly) followed the ground rules that I’d set out and (mostly) behaved herself over the past few weeks. The days had been hard enough without the two of us fighting, on top of everything else.

“I’ll hold her,” my dad said, and took Esme for a turn of his own. “She can stand on my knees.” He had been making an effort to be a better grandpa, and I was also glad about that. Things were going better than I could have hoped from their direction, and it was great. Also, my little niece Amelia was thriving, Nicola felt good and mostly back to herself, Jude was overjoyed with his family, Addie and Granger brimmed with happiness, Juliet seemed to be ok, Brenna’s brattiness wasn’t overwhelming, and Grace was…well, Grace was Grace.

So everyone was doing very well. Almost everyone.

“Sophie, come sit with me,” Nicola ordered, so I joined her as she went inside with Amelia. “Ok,” she said as she unhooked the cup of her nursing bra. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said, and she looked frustrated. “Sorry, but there’s nothing. No change.”

“And Daniel still won’t talk about it? And you haven’t done anything to fix that?”

“What do you want me to do, Nicola?” I demanded. “Should I sit on his chest and force him to move his lips and say what I want to hear?” No matter what he said, though, I couldn’t force him to feel the way I wanted him to. I was so sorry for holding back the information about his mother, but of course my apologies weren’t enough. By now, I had really, really learned my lesson about delving into people’s lives. I was done with that. And “sorry” didn’t encompass how awful I felt.

My sister appeared to be considering my idea of sitting on him. “No,” she said slowly, “he looks very strong now. I guess that wouldn’t work.”

“Neither did the ten-page letter in which I explained myself. Neither did bringing a picnic to his jobsite, neither did the dinners I made, neither did the cake with ‘I Was Wrong’ in icing on the top, neither did my song. I wrote it to explain why I hadn’t told him and to apologize again. The chorus was, ‘Please, please forgive me.’”

“You sang to him?” She winced.

“I know my voice is bad, but the lyrics were the important part,” I answered irritably. “But nothing has worked and I probably don’t deserve his forgiveness, anyway.” I paused. “No, it’s not ‘probably,’ because I’m positive that I don’t deserve it. It doesn’t matter why I didn’t tell him right away.I should have, and that’s the final answer.”

“At least he’s not ignoring you.”

No, he wasn’t doing that anymore. It had only lasted for a night and part of the next day after I’d given him the dossier on his mother, the papers that spelled out how she was alive, that she lived nearby, that she’d never been his dad’s wife, and that she’d gone on to marry someone else and they’d started another family. She could have been in Daniel’s life all along but for some reason, she’d chosen not to be. She’d left him with a man who was totally unstable and cruel. Why?

Of course, that was the question. And by keeping the information about her from him, I’d prevented him from looking for the answers. I knew that, and I knew how dumb I was.

“I know that I was wrong,” I announced to my sister and her daughter, who popped off Nicola’s nipple and seemed to stare at me accusingly. “It was totally wrong, but as I said in the song I wrote, ‘I was trying to protect you, but instead I’ve only vexed you.’”

My sister switched Amelia to her other breast. “‘Protect’ and ‘vex’ don’t rhyme. No wonder he didn’t like the song.”

“It’s a slant rhyme, and the rest of the verses were really good,” I let her know.

“How many verses were there?”

Twelve, and no, they hadn’t been good. Anyway, the song hadn’t worked because Daniel had only nodded when I finished singing and said, “Sophie, I understand that you’re sorry.” It hadn’t made him like me again, though.

“I don’t blame him in the least,” I said, instead of answering her question. “If I were in his position, I probably wouldn’t talk to me at all and in spite of how he feels about me, he’s still so amazing. I couldn’t have made it through these past few weeks without his help.” He’d come over and played with Esme, got her to sleep, brought us dinners, stepped in when I’d had a problem with the guys fixing the roof—he’d been all-around indispensable and wonderful. But there was definitely a huge change in our relationship, kind of like a freeze. He would talk to me about mundane things, like baby food and car repairs, but if I tried to go any deeper…no. We were not any deeper than that.

“I was trying to protect him from the truth,” I told my sister. “They never moved.”

“Huh?”

“It was the first thing I thought of when I discovered that his mother was here in Michigan, and I’m sure that he realized it, too. Daniel and his father never moved. I looked up his dad’s disability payments and they all went to the same address, that old shack, for more than forty years.”

“I hated that Daniel lived like that,” she muttered. “I should have called CPS. Why didn’t I?”

“He didn’t want you to, but yes, everyone should have done things differently,” I said. “The point is, though, that they never left that place. They were in the same spot where they’d always been, so if she’d gone to look for him, she would have found him. That means she must not have even tried. She left her baby there, alone with a terrible father.” I paused. “And so did I, when we were older. I left him to fend for himself and I feel so guilty about it.”

“I understand that you want to protect him now, but you can’t do that to people,” Nicola told me. “I know because I’m always the one who wants to do stuff like that, too. If something could upset Jude, I want to keep it from him. When I had that weird ultrasound—”

“What weird ultrasound? You never told me that!”

“Yes, it’s a thing I do, too,” she acknowledged. “The difference is, that was information that affected me. It was my information.”

“And this wasn’t. It was something I had found out and it sucked, but I should have walked across the street and handed it over to Daniel. So many times, I wanted to either tell him or just lie and say that there was nothing to find.”

“Sophie…”

“I know! It was wrong to hide the truth and I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry, very sorry. I can’t even express how sorry I am, not even in twelve verses of a song. That day when Patrick and Dad got in the fight—”

“You mean, when you hit our brother?”

“Yes, that day.” I’d started calling it Duel Day; just like Naked Night, all those months ago, it had been a monument to human idiocy. “When Daniel and I were driving home, I thought about what I was going to tell Esme. Like, when she’s older and wants to know about her parents? What am I supposed to say? And then I realized, well, she’ll have to know the truth. Not the whole story dumped on her all at once, and I’ll have to explain it so that it makes sense for her age. But I’ll tell her, even though the only thing I want is to protect her from anything that could ever hurt her.”

“She has to know.” Nicola nodded.

“It’s not fair for her to be in the dark about her past,” I continued. “Look at what happened to all my former clients when they tried to hide parts of themselves from others. It backfires. It just doesn’t work.” It could lead, in some cases, to murder. Mr. Horner had never been found.

My sister nodded. “And?”

“And I looked over at Daniel and I knew that I couldn’t hold anything back from him, either, even though…” I stopped. “If you had seen the look on his face when he was reading about his mother, how she was literally half an hour away when he needed her…” Again, I trailed off, shaking my head as I remembered. “He deserved to know the truth, the whole truth, even though it sucked.”

“Are you saying that you told him everything?” my sister asked. “Are you sure?”

No, I knew that I hadn’t done that. “I told him a lot.”

“Did you talk to him about your graduation night?”

No, I hadn’t done that. Nicola herself didn’t know the whole story of what had happened between Daniel and me in the back seat of the car, and I didn’t want to tell her now, either. But my sister was not one to be deterred. As she put Amelia on her shoulder to burp her, she fixed me with a glare and started to boss. “Sophie, you better—”

But the incipient rant was cut off. “Ok, I don’t want you to be upset,” my sister Addie announced as she walked into the room. “Don’t get upset, but Mom asked him over.”

I stood and walked quickly to the back yard, where I saw my mom holding Esme again. This time, though, my brother was with them, smiling at his daughter.

It was fine, I told myself as I loaded plates and silverware into my new dishwasher later that night. It was totally ok. I paused for a moment and listened to the sounds in the other room of Daniel reading to the baby. She was fine.

“It’s time for bed now. Sleep tight and I’ll see you tomorrow, Esme,” he told her quietly, and she made soft sounds back to him. Next, I heard the door close and then he joined me in the kitchen and as usual, I felt a rush of relief and happiness when I saw him. I felt so much, actually, that I turned my head to blink because tears had sprung up in my eyes.

“She was pretty tired,” he remarked.

“It was a big afternoon at my parents’ house. She played and crawled for miles.” He nodded and started for the door. “Don’t go,” I said quickly. “You could hang out, if you wanted. Just, you know, tell me about your day or whatever. Just talk a little.”

He looked at me for a moment, thinking about that offer.

“I made another cake,” I said. I’d whipped it together while Esme had taken her morning nap, before we’d gone over to my parents’ house. “Do you want a piece?”

“You don’t have to keep baking.”

“I don’t mind,” I told him. “I remember that you used to like it when I baked.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to try so hard.” He sat down at the kitchen table, and I thought that in fact, I would have to try harder. “I can stay for a while. Did you really make another cake?”

I had, so I got it out and cut a slice. “How did you spend your Saturday?” I asked.

“I talked to my mom.”

“What?” Fortunately, I had placed the dessert on the table because I would have dropped it if it were still in my grasp. I took a lurching step toward him and I put myself into a chair. “What happened?” I asked.

“The day after you gave me the information, her dossier, I sent her an email. I figured that was the least intrusive way to go.”

He was concerned about intruding on her life? “What did you say?”

“I told her who I was and gave her my number. It took a while for her to get back to me. It took until today, when she called.” He paused. “I thought I would know her voice. Somehow, I thought I would remember it when I heard her again, but I didn’t. She said, ‘This is Aileen. I believe I gave birth to you.’ I said yes, I thought that was correct, and she asked me how I was doing. I said that I was fine and she said that she was, also. It went like that for the next few minutes, a question and then an answer with a word or two. Then she said she had to go, but she hesitated and she told me that she didn’t want me to contact her again. She wasn’t even calling from the home or cell numbers in her file, so maybe she was trying to hide them from me. She said that she was sorry for what had happened, but that we couldn’t talk anymore. I hung up.”

“Are you ok?”

He looked at me. “I thought you would grill me for more information.”

Well, I really wanted to do that, but it was more important for me to know how he was. “I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.”

“You know, I’m not sure,” he responded, the words dragging slightly. “I spent a lot of years believing that she had died. I looked for her, too, but I was using the wrong name, I guess. I was so shocked when I read your papers. It was like getting hit over the head.”

Like a coconut dropping onto him. I reached for his hand, and he let me hold it.

“I had to read everything five, ten times before I really took in what it said, and even then…I think I may still be in shock. I can’t understand it.”

“I can’t either,” I admitted.

“I asked, ‘Why didn’t you ever come see me?’ She didn’t have much of an answer, except that she was busy. She was busy?” he wondered. “So I asked, ‘Why did you leave in the first place?’ She said that my dad scared her and she wanted to get away. He was very excited about her pregnancy and she thought that if she left me there with him, then he would leave her alone.”

Her son was her sacrificial lamb, in other words. I literally bit my tongue and didn’t say that out loud.

But Daniel had already grasped that fact, too. “She didn’t come out and say it, but she meant that she walked away to save herself. And she didn’t tell me all the backstory, but I guessed at some of it. Her husband had left her just before she got pregnant with me and my dad was only the way she was passing time. Back then, he must not have been quite so…you know. Off. Ill. However you want to say it. I know you only saw him when he had the long hair and that bushy beard, and he wasn’t bathing too much, but before, he was good looking. I found some pictures of him and I also remember a little from when I was a kid. He was a handsome guy.”

“I can imagine that he was handsome. If you look like him, then it makes sense.”

He stared at me for a moment before he said, “Thank you, Sophie. I think that was a compliment.”

I nodded, because it had been—but mostly it was a statement of fact.

“I’ve been waiting all these weeks to hear from her. Like how you and your siblings used to get excited before Christmas, that’s how I think I’ve been feeling. You knew that you’d all celebrate and open presents, that it would be a fun time.”

“With some fighting, but mostly yes, the holidays were fun.” His hadn’t been, but I’d been too oblivious to recognize that until we were in high school. Nicola had been the one to tell me to invite him over—why had I been so dumb? So thoughtless? “Now you feel let down, because the conversation didn’t go the way you wanted?” I hazarded.

“I feel very disappointed, which I was telling myself wouldn’t happen. I was thinking that I’m a grown man and that she was only some stranger who I’d thought was dead, so she wouldn’t have any effect on me.” He shook his head slightly. “She did.”

“Of course! She’s your mother. Well, she gave birth to you,” I corrected myself. “That’s not what really makes someone a parent.”

“No, you know that pretty well,” he was saying, but I had to briefly excuse myself to go check on Esme. I snuck into her dim room and put my hand on her tummy as she breathed quietly in her crib. She was ok.

“She’s ok,” I reported to Daniel when I got back. He still hadn’t touched the cake, I noticed, and I was also too upset to eat.

“Did you see your brother today?”

“Yes. Is it obvious?”

“You get like this every time it happens,” he noted. He pointed at my head, and I realized that I was twisting my hair into knots.

“It’s all right, though,” I assured us both. “He should see her, because he’s her father. I’m not going to keep them apart.” I had promised it to myself and to other members of my family. And I still hadn’t moved to legally adopt her, either. I’d talked to the lawyer again and the option to try was still there—I just hadn’t exercised it yet. Over the past few weeks, since I’d officially moved back to my own home, Patrick had definitely been around and I could see that he was making an effort. He had a temporary place of his own because my mom had given him money, but he also had a job in a restaurant that he was showing up for. He’d been looking for a position that would use his business degree, too. The beater car he’d been driving had given up the ghost, but Granger had loaned him an old Jeep which was much safer—and he’d put a car seat in the back. My brother had also apologized more to me and to my dad, and for now, a truce was holding.

“It’s ok, though,” I told Daniel, and smoothed my hair. “Tell me more about that phone call and what you want to do next.”

We talked about it for at least an hour. Eventually, he did eat the cake and he had a glass of milk, too, very cold from the new refrigerator. I felt like this was a huge step for us, and I wanted him to know that I would help, if he’d let me. I was prepared to do anything I could.

It got late enough that I was fighting off yawns, since I’d now adapted to a totally diurnal lifestyle. I didn’t let the yawns out, but my eyes teared up every time I held them in. “I better get home,” he said, and I told him no, but he nodded. “You’ll be up early in the morning. Maybe I could come over and we could put together that bookshelf you bought for Esme’s room. I want to anchor it to the wall so it’s safe.”

“That would be great. Thank you,” I said as I walked him to the door. I watched carefully until all the lights came on in his house, and I knew he was ok. Well, safe inside, but as far as his emotional state? He must have been a wreck, which was exactly why I hadn’t told him about his mom—but all I had done was delay this problem, not solve it.

Sugar. I was just about to delay things again, too. I spent a little while in our sibling group chat, which was full of issues relating to Addie’s wedding, and I wasted a few more minutes responding to my mother’s questions about what shade of orange would be the most flattering on Esme, since Mom was knitting a pumpkin costume for her for Halloween. I was sure that she would be an adorable pumpkin in any shade, which was what I responded and Mom agreed.

And then, finally, I did what I’d been avoiding: I texted my brother. I wasn’t blocked anymore, and he was still a night owl. Well, since he didn’t have to worry about a baby keeping him awake…

No, I was trying not to think like that. “We need to talk,” I wrote, and he said yes, he wanted to. Could he come over? Yeah, he meant right now. He’d been waiting for me to reach out, he said.

I wasn’t a night owl anymore myself, but I said yes. This situation was untenable and I knew it. I made a pot of coffee and slammed two cups, but I still yawned as I waited by the window. It wasn’t too long, though, before my brother pulled up and parked.

“Hi, Patrick,” I said, and let him in.

“Hi.” He stood in the hallway and looked around, and I tried to remember if he’d been here before. “Is Esme…no, she’s probably asleep by now.”

“That makes me so mad,” I told him. “That’s something you should know…I’m sorry. I’m going to try not to be adversarial.”

He’d already turned red. “I’m aware that I’m a crappy father, Sophie. I already know that.”

He really couldn’t know, though. She hadn’t even been alive for a year, and yet she’d learned so much and changed so drastically that it was almost hard to recognize her! And he’d missed it, almost all of it. I had the urge to hit him again, but instead I invited him into the kitchen. There would be no cake served to this guest, though.

“I want to talk to you about custody,” I stated, and he lost the red in his cheeks and turned pale.

“Are we going to court? You told me to expect the papers, but…”

“No, I don’t want to do that. If you want to give up your rights to her, it would be simpler if you’d cooperate,” I explained. “I talked to a lawyer and we can draw up agreements so that we wouldn’t have to fight.”

“I don’t want to fight, either.”

I relaxed.“Good.”

“But I don’t want—what is that?” Because someone had started to pound on my door, and I heard my name yelled, loudly.

“That’s Daniel!” I said, and I raced to the front. “What’s the matter?” I asked, but he had grabbed me.

“Sophie, are you all right? Is the baby ok? Who’s in there with you?” He was lifting me as he asked those questions, like, he’d picked me right up and moved me off into the front yard.

“Soph, what’s happening?” my brother said from my doorway, and lights came on in Franz’s house next door.

“Patrick?” Daniel asked. He must not have noticed that his arms were still around me, holding me.

“He came over to talk,” I explained, and I didn’t move away from his grasp. “That’s all.”

And slowly, Daniel did relax his hold and step away. “I saw the car and I got worried, after the break-in,” he explained.

“What? Are you putting my daughter in danger, Sophie?” Patrick asked, and boy, that was something coming from him! But before an argument could erupt, Daniel looped his arm around me again and walked me towards the house.

“Let’s go inside,” he suggested, and he called over to Franz next door to say that everything was fine.

This time, we moved to the living room, and Daniel sat next to me on the couch, the new one. Patrick took one of the chairs and he did demand an explanation, because no one had told him about the men robbing me (and he hadn’t found out from Mom, since no one had told her, either). “There’s no danger to Esme,” I said. “They don’t need anything from me anymore, and I have the alarm system on all the windows and doors, and new locks.” I had balked at the suggestions of a guard dog and weapons, though. “I would never, ever put her in danger because I love her so much.”

“You may find this hard to believe, but I do, too,” Patrick said, and yes. Yes, I did find that unbelievable, but maybe he thought it was true. He probably just didn’t understand what love was.

“Go on,” I invited, and he told me all the things he’d been doing to improve himself. Most of them I’d already heard about from our mother, except she hadn’t mentioned that he was in therapy.

“Mom doesn’t know that,” he explained. “I think a lot of my problems come from her and Dad—not that I can push the blame onto them anymore, because I’m old enough to act better. But I didn’t want to hurt her feelings so I didn’t tell her about talking to someone.”

“Well, that’s nice of you,” I admitted (grudgingly). “I don’t think that our parents did you any favors, either.”

“I also didn’t do any for Esme,” he said. “I realize that.”

“Do you? Do you have any idea what it’s like for a parent to desert you?” I asked. My eyes slipped to Daniel. “It must feel like the bottom dropped out. A parent is the person who’s supposed to love you above all others, above even herself—or himself,” I corrected. “If that person doesn’t care about you, you must wonder if anyone can. But they do! They really, really do. The fact that your mother—or father, as the case may be—walked out just shows that she—or he—is a total idiot. You are, without a doubt, a person worth caring about. That’s why someone might do incredibly stupid things to protect you,” I announced, looking at Daniel. Then I remembered what I was supposed to be saying. “Or Esme,” I added. I’d confused myself.

I’d also confused my brother. “I don’t know what you’re talking about except that you’re calling me an idiot, and yeah, I don’t disagree. I don’t know what I’ve been doing for the past few years. I lost Liv—”

“You were engaged, and you cheated on her and then broke up with her. Let’s be honest,” I suggested, and he flushed again. “You have to be honest if you want…” I stopped.

“Go ahead and give it to me,” my brother urged. “Don’t hold back.”

“No, that’s all,” I told him. I wasn’t really in a position to lecture him on honesty.

“I understand that I’ve screwed up badly,” Patrick went on. “I do. I’m very glad that you haven’t taken me to court because you probably could have wiped the floor with me. I’m grateful for all you’ve done for my daughter.”

“You have no idea how much she’s done,” Daniel put in. “You have no idea how grateful you should be.”

My brother didn’t answer except to ask, “Can you let me try? Can you give me a chance to be responsible? I took a bunch of weird shifts at the restaurant so that I can be there when you and Addie are working. I can take Esme instead of you sending her to daycare. Mom says you hate it.”

“Mom has a big mouth.”

“Can you let me try?” he persisted. “Please?”

I loved my brother. I hated all the dumb things he’d done, but down at the heart of me, I also loved him. I could see that he was trying to turn over a new leaf; I also knew that it was wrong to keep him from his daughter. Still, I hesitated, and the silence stretched.

“Why don’t you think about it and get back to him?” Daniel suggested to me, and then he turned to Patrick. “It’s a huge responsibility and you haven’t shown yourself to be very trustworthy. Let her consider it.”

“That’s fair,” my brother answered, and I wanted to add that it was also probably more than he deserved, but I held that in. We all stood up and looked at each other, then he tried to hug me.

“No,” I told him, and put up my hands. “I’m not ready to forgive you. Maybe I could for myself, for my part, but not for Esme. She didn’t deserve any of this.”

“I’m going to try to make it up to her,” he promised. “I’ll make it up to both of you, Sophie.”

Daniel followed him to the door and he locked it. “Can you turn on the alarm?” he said.

“I have to let you out, first.”

“Do you care if I stay? I got worried when I saw that car and I didn’t recognize it. I don’t know, but—fuck, can I sleep here? I’d feel better if I was near, just in case.”

I was already nodding. “You can have my bed. I have a set of clean sheets that I can put on it.”

“The couch is fine. Do you care if I’m here?”

“No, not at all,” I said, speaking before the words had finished emerging from his mouth. “There’s more cake, too, and if you want, I could make something else. Anything.”

Daniel’s words were kind of an echo of what my brother had said to me. “You don’t have to make it up to me, Sophie.”

I nodded, but I knew that he was wrong. I’d sat on my couch and told my brother that he was a bad person. Who was I, though? I was a woman who had kept secrets and had lied. I was also a person who hadn’t come clean yet. And I was lecturing others?

“I just want you to be comfortable,” I said. So I put the extra sheets on the couch for him—I insisted on that, and because I didn’t have extra blankets yet, I took the comforter off my bed but told him that it had come from a closet. The couch wasn’t quite long enough since he’d grown so much from when I’d known him before, but he swore that he was comfortable.

It wasn’t that warm in the living room, though, because the old steam heater in there had never worked very well. I really should have gotten that fixed, and I would now, definitely. I hoped that he wasn’t too uncomfortable in the slightly curled position he’d had to assume. By now, it was very late—very, very late, and Esme would be up in only a couple of hours.

Still, though, I couldn’t seem to sleep. I kept thinking about Patrick’s visit, and why I hadn’t already sued for custody. I wondered if he would be able to fix his life the way he claimed to want to and I wondered what would be best for his daughter. I flipped back and forth between my new sheets, listening to the baby monitor and worrying whether my brother was being honest about his life. Was he telling the truth?

The truth was so hard to grasp, sometimes. It could shimmer elusively, like the reflection of the moon on the Caribbean Sea—which I had never actually seen, not in person. I had never stepped foot on a beach with turquoise waters rolling up onto it, and I had never strolled beneath palm trees. The man of my dreams wasn’t a person named Caspian, although he had been a convenient figure in my efforts to make my family leave me alone. He had been a good foil to draw their minds away from the real reason that I didn’t want to date, or have a boyfriend, or even consider another man.

Caspian and the coconut…it had been a good story, but it hadn’t been real. I had never admitted the truth about that to my sisters and I had never admitted what really lay in my heart, not even to myself.

Daniel had come over here when he’d seen a strange car. He’d run over in case we needed him. Was he warm enough? He couldn’t have been comfortable, though. I slid out from between the sheets and walked quietly down the hall to the living room. I would check on him, like I sometimes did for Esme. I would just make sure that he was all right and that would make me feel better, too.

He sat up, and I froze. “No, I’m not asleep,” he said quietly. “You didn’t wake me.”

“You must be uncomfortable. You should go home and get in your bed,” I recommended, but as I said it, I sat on the coffee table and adjusted the comforter over him.

“You can’t sleep, either?”

I shook my head.

“Are you worried about Esme?”

“That’s a big part of it,” I answered. “I can see where this is heading. Patrick is going to get his life back on track and then he’ll want her to live with him. And everyone will support him, because he always gets what he wants.” I paused. “And because he’s her father, biologically. I’m just an aunt who took over.”

“I think you’re more than that.”

“I don’t know, exactly. I’m not sure what I am. I’ve been trying to be less—you know, not so ultra-Sophie.”

“I have no idea what that means,” he answered.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m worried about you, too. I know what I did,” I said.

“Yeah, you should have told me right away.”

“Yes, but I’m talking about what happened between us before, eleven years ago. I remember how you looked at me after…” I took a breath and it shuddered out. “I couldn’t do that to you, not for a second time. I kept imagining how I’d tell you that your mother was right there, that she’d been so close, and I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want you to know and because I didn’t want to hurt you. Again.”

“She did it, not you.”

“But I’m so sorry about everything,” I told him. I readjusted the comforter, patting his arm as I did, and then I wiped my eyes on my sweatshirt. “I’m sorry. I’ll never say it enough.”

It was very quiet in the living room, with just the soft city noises and the quiet hum of the baby monitor.

“Come here for a second,” he said, and opened his arms.

Did he mean that he was going to hug me? Cautiously, I moved to the couch and leaned forward, resting against his chest. He put his arms around me and yes, it was a hug. Oh, holy Mary. It was amazing. I hugged him back, and before I was very aware of it, I was crying pretty hard.

“I’m sorry,” I kept repeating. “I’m sorry.”

“Just tell me the truth from here on out,” Daniel said. He rubbed his cheek against my hair. “Just be honest with me.”

I would try.