We ate strawberry pancakes with our plates on our knees.
Sophie hummed between bites like it was the best meal of her life.
Rebecca watched her daughter with a soft, tired kind of love.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, not quite meeting my eyes.
“I didn’t do anything. It was flour and strawberries.”
“You know that isn’t what I mean.”
“You know that isn’t what I mean.”
I did know.
But I let it sit there between us, unspoken.
Sophie leaned her head against my arm and yawned.
“Can he come back?” she asked her mother.
Rebecca hesitated.
I watched something flicker across her face, hope and fear tangled together.
“Can he come back?”
“We’ll see,” she said.
“That means yes,” Sophie whispered to me like a secret.
I thought Sophie’s request was simple.
I didn’t realize she was pulling me toward a truth her mother had spent twelve years hiding.
“That means yes,”
When I finally stood to leave, Rebecca walked me to the door.
“You really don’t have to do this,” she said.
“I want to.”
“Why?”
I didn’t have a clean answer.
Twelve years of silence stood between us, and a hundred questions I had never gotten to ask.
I didn’t have a clean answer.
“Because she asked me to,” I said finally.
She nodded and looked away.
I drove home under a sky going pale at the edges, telling myself this was one wish, one family, one closed chapter briefly reopened.
I had no idea that Sophie’s final wish would shatter that belief.
“Because she asked me to,”
A few days later, I came back with a red convertible, its top already down.
Sophie’s face lit up like a summer sky.
“You actually found one,” she said.
“You asked, didn’t you?”
We drove around the block a dozen times while she stretched her arms into the wind and laughed until her cheeks turned pink.
“You actually found one,”
After that wish, something shifted in me.
I stopped visiting on behalf of the foundation.
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