The words hit me harder than anything she had said before.
“She doesn’t know she said it,” Linda continued. “I wasn’t going to tell you. But maybe you need to understand that her heart is more complicated than her anger.”
Then she walked back toward Sophie’s room, leaving me alone beneath the buzzing hospital lights.
That night, I didn’t go home right away.
I sat in my car in the hospital parking garage, gripping the steering wheel.
For the first time since the divorce, I let myself remember our marriage without editing out the good parts.
Sophie dancing barefoot in our first apartment because the radio played her favorite song.
Sophie crying when we assembled a crib too early, then laughing because I had attached one side backward.
Sophie standing in the kitchen with flour on her cheek, insisting that pancakes counted as dinner.
Sophie asleep on the couch, one hand resting on her stomach during those brief weeks when we believed the future was arriving.
