That I needed you to not be the fixer for once, that I needed you to just She stopped. Her eyes were bright now. I needed you to need me back. And I didn't know how to say that, and I was ashamed of it. So, I left instead.
The room held them both in silence. James felt something move through him that was too big and too layered to name in real time. There was the anger. There was the grief, old grief, the kind that had composted into something denser than sadness. There was something that felt uncomfortably like recognition, and under all of it the deepest and most unwelcome thing, the specific ache of understanding.
He sat down on the couch, not in the armchair where he'd been all the way across the room from her. On the couch, Sophia stayed standing, watching him, trying to read what that meant. Sit down, he said. She sat not beside him, at the other end. He stared at the coffee table for a long moment.
I heard you, he said finally. She waited. I heard what you said about not being easy to come to with hard things. He looked at his hands. My mother has said variations of that to me my whole life.
Marcus says it in his way. Even Ava, she'll sometimes look at me when I'm being too James Carter about something and she'll say, "Dad, you're doing the thing where you fix everything instead of feeling it." He exhaled. "I know I do that. I have always known I do that."
"Why?" Sophia asked quietly. "Because feeling it doesn't fix it," he said it simply. "The way you say things that have been true your whole life. Growing up the way I did in the house I grew up in feelings were a luxury.
You felt things later. You handled things first. And somewhere along the way, that became the only gear I knew how to use. Sophia was quiet for a moment. And now, now I'm 41 years old and sitting across from you having a conversation I should have had six years ago about things that should have been said six years ago.
And I'm He stopped, looked at her. I'm angry, Sophia. I want to be clear about that. I am genuinely deeply angry, about the pregnancy, about the years, about being kept out of something that was mine to be part of. I know.
And I also He stopped again. This was the harder part. The part that felt like stepping off something without being certain there was ground below. I also understand some of what you're saying about me, about how I can be, and that's an uncomfortable thing to have to hold at the same time as the anger." Sophia looked at him with those impossible eyes and she said very carefully, "I'm not telling you any of that to excuse what I did.
I want to be clear about that, too. I'm not saying it was your fault that I left. It wasn't. The choice I made was mine. I'm telling you because I think she steadied herself.