He was going to have to call his mother in the morning. He was going to have to tell Ava something, not everything, but something. And at some point in some conversation he was not yet ready to have. He was going to have find out the rest of what Sophia Mitchell was not telling him because there was something she was not telling him. He'd known her well enough to know when a story had a room in it she wasn't letting him into yet.
He'd heard it in the pauses. The careful way she answered the question about Noah's father, not in the picture like she'd rehearsed exactly how much to say and exactly how little. He didn't know what it was, but he knew it was there. He turned the kitchen light off, walked down the hallway, could hear faintly through the guest room door, the sound of Sophia doing the quiet, repetitive thing that people do when they're trying to get a baby to sleep, humming something low, barely a melody, more of a vibration, a frequency meant only for very small, very new ears. He stood there in the dark hallway and listened for one moment longer than he should have.
Then he went to his room, got into his bed, and stared at the ceiling until the rain started. He didn't sleep. What he did instead was the thing he always did when something he couldn't fix was happening. He took it apart in his mind and tried to understand the components. He had known Sophia Mitchell for four years before she left.
They had met when he was 31 at a neighborhood cookout hosted by a mutual friend from his church. She had been standing by the table of food, holding a plate, and she'd said something dry and specific about the way someone had seasoned the potato salad. Not mean, just accurate. And he'd laughed. Genuinely laughed.
And that had been that. They dated for a year before they got serious. Got serious for two years. Started talking about the next step, the real next step, a house, maybe kids of their own, a future that had their names on it together. And then one afternoon, James came home to an apartment that was half empty, not violently empty, not angrily empty, carefully empty, like someone had taken great pains to only take what was theirs.
Her clothes, her books, the small appliances she'd brought, the succulent she kept on the windowsill, her grandmother's photograph that usually sat on the shelf by the television. There was a note on the kitchen counter. James, I'm sorry. I need to figure some things out on my own. Please don't try to find me.
I'll explain everything when I can. He read that note so many times he wore out the creases. He never explained it to anyone the full way happened. He told his mother that things just didn't work out. He told Marcus something vague about growing apart.
He told Ava years later when Ava was old enough to start asking why she didn't have a mother at home that sometimes adults make choices that hurt other people even when they don't mean to. And that the important thing was that they were taken care of each other. She and him. He had built an entire life on the rubble of that afternoon. And now the woman who created the rubble was asleep in his guest room.
Sometime around 2:00 in the morning, he heard Noah start to cry the specific rhythmic cry of a baby who was hungry or uncomfortable or simply registering a complaint about the general situation. He heard Sophia moving, heard her voice murmuring, settling the baby back down. Quiet again. James closed his eyes. He thought about what she'd said on the porch.
You're the only person I trust enough to ask. He didn't know if that should make him feel better or worse. He thought about Ava and how he was going to explain this. Ava was nine and brilliant and asked questions like a federal investigator. She was going to want the whole story, or at least a version of it that made sense.