Chapter 4: Sophie's Voice
My room was on the third floor, at the end of the east corridor — a small, clean space with a single window that looked out over the estate's back garden.
I had lived in it for eleven months without ever once feeling like it belonged to me.
I kept the phone in the drawer of my nightstand, underneath a folded scarf that had been Sophie's.
Pale blue, with a small embroidered daisy near the hem.
She had left it in my car once, years before any of this, and I had never gotten around to returning it.
Ethan followed me upstairs.
He stood in the doorway of my room while I opened the drawer, and I noticed he didn't come inside — as if crossing the threshold would be a presumption he wasn't ready to make.
I turned the old phone on.
The battery was at eleven percent.
I had charged it once a month, every month, for the same reason I kept the scarf.
Some things you maintain without knowing exactly why.
"There are nine messages," I said.
"The last one was two days before she d*ed."
Ethan nodded once.
He didn't speak.
I pressed play on the first message.
Sophie's voice filled the small room — warm and quick, the way she always spoke, like she was always slightly behind where she wanted to be in the conversation.
*"Clara, it's me.
I know it's been forever.
I'm sorry.
I'm so embarrassingly pregnant right now and I keep meaning to call and then Leo kicks and I completely lose my train of thought.
Call me back when you get this.
I have so much to tell you."*
Ethan's hand came up and pressed flat against the door frame.
I played the second.
The third.
Each one a small window — Sophie laughing about a crib that took four hours to assemble, Sophie describing the way Ethan looked the first time he felt Leo kick, Sophie reading out a list of names she had rejected and why, her voice dropping into a stage whisper as if someone might overhear.
By the sixth message, Ethan had moved from the doorway.
He was sitting on the edge of the single chair near the window, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed.
I played the eighth message.
Sophie's voice was different.
Still hers, but quieter.
Careful in a way she hadn't been before.
*"Clara.
I need to tell you something and I need you to not think I'm being dramatic, because I know how I can get.
But something is wrong.
I don't know what it is yet.
There's a woman — Ethan's been seeing her, I think, before we were properly separated, I don't know the timeline exactly — and she came to the house last week.
She said she just wanted to drop something off for Ethan.
But she went upstairs, Clara.
She went upstairs and I didn't realize until after she'd gone, and when I checked the nursery, the window was open.
It had been latched.
I always latch it."*
A pause on the recording.
The sound of Sophie breathing.
*"I'm probably being paranoid.
I'm going to talk to Ethan.
I just — if anything ever happens to me, I need someone to know.
I need someone who will look after Leo.
You're the only person I trust enough to ask.
Will you?
Please?"*
The message ended.
Ethan hadn't moved.
His hands were locked together between his knees, his knuckles white.
"Play the last one," he said.
His voice was barely audible.
*"It's me again.
I talked to Ethan.
He said the window thing was nothing, that the latch has been loose for months, that he'll have it fixed.
Maybe he's right.
I don't know.
I feel better today.
Leo's been kicking all morning and I've been talking to him about you, actually — I told him he has an honorary aunt he hasn't met yet and he seemed very impressed."*
Sophie laughed on the recording.
That quick, bright laugh.
*"I love you, Clara.
Come visit us when he's here.
Come soon."*
The message ended.
The phone screen went dark.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment.
"The woman she described," I said finally.
"The one who came to the house.
Who went upstairs."
Ethan raised his head.
"It was Victoria," he said.
It wasn't a question.
"Sophie didn't know her name.
But she described her.
Tall.
Blonde.
Expensive coat." I set the phone down on the nightstand.
"Ethan — Sophie and Victoria never officially met.
You told me that yourself, the week I started.
You said Sophie never knew about Victoria."
He stood up from the chair.
"I told you that," he said slowly, "because that's what Victoria told me.
She said they'd never crossed paths." He moved to the window, looked out at the garden below, then turned back.
"Sophie called her a woman Ethan had been seeing.
How did Victoria know where we lived?
I never gave her this address.
We always met in the city."
The question sat between us.
"Someone gave it to her," I said.
Ethan's phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.
He pulled it out, looked at the screen, and his expression shifted into something harder.
"It's my head of security," he said.
"They found Victoria."
May you like
He looked up at me.
"She's not alone."
