Chapter 16
We returned to the abandoned estate in early autumn.
Sophia asked to go.
I would never have suggested it.
The cloudy pool had been drained. The dead leaves were gone. The storage boxes had been removed. Rafael had the metal enclosure dismantled weeks earlier.
Only four bolt marks remained in the stone where the bars once stood.
Sophia stared at them.
“Cage gone.”
“Yes.”
She walked to the edge of the empty pool.
I stayed one step behind.
Not closer.
She pointed toward the deep end.
“Bags there.”
“Yes.”
“Mine.”
“Yes.”
Then she looked at me.
“You found me.”
I swallowed.
“Yes.”
She shook her head.
“No.”
I frowned.
“I called first.”
I understood.
For three days she had been reaching toward a phone held outside the bars, believing I had stopped answering. In her mind, the important part was not that I climbed a wall.
She had tried to reach me first.
“Yes,” I said. “You did.”
Sophia seemed satisfied.
We walked through the house together.
Her old room at the estate was empty.
She asked why.
I told her nobody would pack it for her again.
“If you ever want things here, you choose them.”
She picked one object from the box Rafael brought.
A family photograph.
The same one recovered from the pool.
She placed it on the windowsill.
Not because everything in that photograph was repaired.
Camilla and I were still separated.
Lucia was gone from our lives.
Marco remained beside me, but with the kind of honesty that only survives after a family almost destroys itself.
The picture did not promise we would become what we were.
It only proved Sophia had a past nobody could erase by sinking it in water.
Before we left, she looked back toward the empty pool.
“Can we make it clean?”
“Yes.”
“Can I swim?”
“When you want.”
She smiled.
May you like
That was the entire point.
When she wanted.
