The fabricated marriage, the art scholarship as cover, the mysterious maintenance worker turned husband who had materialized the day of a very convenient divorce. His phone rang four times while he was still reading. Brena's attorney, his own attorney, a number he didn't recognize Saraphina. He called Saraphina back first. "Don't come here yet," she said.
Her voice was flat in the way that meant she was working very hard to keep it that way. "I'm going to Marin's point. " "Saraphina, I need to talk to them directly," the wards, before this gets worse. It will get worse if you show up unannounced while they're already frightened. I don't have another option. He could hear her moving.
Keys, a door. Wait for me, he said. I'll drive. The ward house was a white clapboard at the end of a quiet street two blocks from the harbor. Sandra and Pete Ward were standing on the porch when Malik and Saraphina pulled up.
And the way they were standing close together, arms crossed, said everything about how the morning had gone for them. The conversation lasted 20 minutes and did not go well. Pete Ward was not hostile, but he was afraid and afraid. People said things in straight lines. He said they had always known Anelise was adopted.
He said they had told her when she was seven. He said they had also always told her that her birth mother had not been in a position to raise her and that this was not the same as not wanting her. He said they had built their entire approach to this question on that foundation carefully over 9 years and now a stranger with lawyers and a scholarship program had arrived to knock it over. Sandra Ward didn't say much. She just watched Saraphina with the expression of a woman trying very hard to be fair to someone she didn't trust.
Saraphina held herself together through all of it. She explained clearly and without defensiveness, that the scholarship was genuine, that she had not planned to reveal herself to analyze without the wards knowledge and consent, that she understood their anger and did not contest it. Then Anelise appeared in the doorway behind her parents. She had clearly been listening. She was still in her school sweatshirt, hair pulled back, and she looked at Saraphina with the expression of someone who had just rearranged a set of facts and didn't like where they had landed.
The scholarship, she said. That was about finding me. Saraphina didn't look away. Yes. So, everything, the visits, the arts council, all of it.
I wanted to know you. Saraphina said, "Before you knew who I was, I didn't want you to meet a situation. I wanted you to meet a person first. " Analise was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was careful and very controlled in the way of teenagers who have learned that saying the real thing out loud makes it too real. If you're actually my mother, she said, "Why did it take you 16 years to get here? " Saraphina opened her mouth.
Nothing came out. It was the one question she had written around in 23 letters and never answered directly because there was no answer that didn't also contain the admission that she had been at 25 too young and too powerless and too afraid and that those were not the same as innocent and not the same as excused. She didn't answer and in the silence something closed in Analyze's face. I think you should go, Pete Ward said quietly. They went.