Chapter 6: The Summer She Never Talked About
I didn't ask Rebecca that night.
I drove home, sat with it, turned it over.
Gary Pruitt was a man who used information the way other people used fists — not always accurately, but always with the intention of causing damage.
Whatever he thought he knew, he had deployed it at the exact moment designed to do the most harm.
That was worth remembering.
But I also knew Rebecca.
And I knew there were things she still hadn't told me.
The paternity test results came back on a Thursday morning.
I was in my car outside the clinic when Carol forwarded the report.
I read it twice.
Then I sat for a while with the phone in my lap and the engine off.
Sophie was my daughter.
I had known it, I realized.
I had known it since the moment she held out that photograph.
But knowing a thing and having it confirmed in black and white are two different experiences entirely.
I drove to Rebecca's house.
Sophie was home — her treatment schedule meant she missed more school than she attended now — and she was on the couch under her blanket fort with a book.
She looked up when I came in and her face did the thing it always did, that particular brightening, and I had to stop in the doorway for a moment before I could walk the rest of the way in.
"You okay?" she asked.
"More than okay." I sat on the edge of the couch.
"How are you feeling today?"
"Seventy percent." She held up the book.
"I'm at the part where everything goes wrong."
"Does it get better?"
"It always gets better." She said it with complete certainty.
"That's the whole point."
Rebecca appeared from the hallway.
She looked at my face and went still.
"Sophie," she said carefully, "can you give us a few minutes?"
Sophie looked between us with the focused attention of a child who has spent her whole life reading rooms.
Then she nodded and picked up her book and went upstairs without being asked twice.
Rebecca and I sat at the kitchen table.
I slid the printed report across to her.
She read it.
Set it down.
Pressed both hands flat on top of it.
"I'm going to ask you something," I said.
"And I need you to tell me the truth.
All of it this time."
She looked up.
"Gary said to ask you what happened the summer before graduation.
He said to ask why you really left."
The color shifted in her face — not draining away this time, but something more complicated.
Something old.
"He was there," she said finally.
"Where?"
"That summer.
He was a friend of my cousin's.
He was twenty-four.
I was seventeen." She stopped.
Started again.
"Something happened at a party in July.
I didn't — I couldn't—" She pressed her lips together.
"I never reported it.
I didn't tell anyone.
I found out I was pregnant six weeks later and I didn't know — I couldn't be certain—"
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Rebecca." My voice came out low.
"Are you telling me you didn't know if Sophie was mine or his?"
"I was terrified." Her eyes filled.
"I ran the numbers over and over.
The timing.
I was almost certain she was yours.
But almost certain isn't certain, and I couldn't — I couldn't tell you something like that and then have it be wrong.
I couldn't put that on you."
"So you left."
"So I left."
I sat with that for a long time.
"He knows," I said.
"Gary knows what he did.
That's why he filed the paternity claim.
Not because he believed it — because he wanted control.
Because he knew you'd never expose him."
She didn't answer.
She didn't have to.
"Rebecca." I waited until she looked at me.
"Sophie is mine.
The test confirms it.
And what Gary did to you — that is not something that disappears because twelve years have passed."
"I can't do this right now.
Sophie is—"
"I know.
I'm not asking you to do anything right now." I reached across the table and covered her hands with mine.
"I'm just asking you to stop carrying it alone."
She looked down at our hands.
A tear dropped onto the report between us.
Upstairs, Sophie's footsteps crossed the floor.
Slow, careful, the particular rhythm of a child who is trying not to tire herself out.
"She asked me last night," Rebecca said quietly, "if you were going to come back."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I thought so."
"You were right."
Rebecca looked up.
For the first time since I had appeared at her door, the expression in her eyes was something I recognized.
Something I remembered from a long time ago, before everything went wrong.
Then her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen and her face changed completely.
May you like
"It's Sophie's doctor," she said.
"He never calls this late."
