Little hearts sometimes drawn over the letter i when she was trying to make me laugh.
After the divorce, I had found a stack of her old notes in my desk drawer.
I couldn’t throw them away.
So I placed them in a shoebox under my bed, where they waited like evidence.
When Marisol asked for Sophie’s address, shame tightened around my throat.
I did not know where she lived now.
For five years, I had known everything about her daily life.
Now I did not even know the street that held her bed.
“Ravenswood,” Sophie said quietly.
The neighborhood was only twenty minutes from my apartment.
Twenty minutes.
All this time, she had been close enough for us to pass each other in a grocery store aisle or stand on the same train platform without knowing.
Yet I had imagined her life as distant because distance made my guilt easier to carry.
The elevator ride downstairs felt longer than the divorce hearing.
Sophie leaned against the rail, eyes closed, the cloth bag pressed against her chest.
I wanted to ask a hundred questions.
When did the symptoms start?
Who had driven her to surgery?
How long had she been afraid?
Had she cried when they wheeled her into the operating room?
Had she wished I was there?
But her exhaustion answered enough.
Outside, the October wind moved dry leaves along the curb.
I helped her into my car carefully.
She murmured thank you without looking at me.
For a moment, we sat in silence.
Two people in a parked car.
Two people surrounded by everything they had failed to say.
Halfway to Ravenswood, Sophie asked me to stop at a pharmacy.
“The hospital gave me enough for tonight,” she said, “but I need soup, crackers, and lemon drops.”
The words lemon drops caught me off guard.
During her first pregnancy, nausea had turned lemon drops into a household necessity.
She used to keep them in every coat pocket, every purse, every drawer.
She must have seen the memory cross my face, because her expression closed.
“Sorry,” she said. “Habit.”
“Don’t apologize for remembering your own life.”
The sentence surprised both of us.
She turned her head and looked at me through the dim light inside the car.
For one brief second, something unguarded passed across her face.
Then it was gone.
At the pharmacy, I moved through the aisles beneath harsh fluorescent lights and gathered everything she had asked for.
Chicken soup.
Crackers.
Lemon drops.
Bottled water.
Gauze pads.
A heating pad.
I almost bought flowers.
Then I stopped.
Flowers were too easy.
Flowers were what guilty men bought when they wanted grief to look beautiful.
Sophie did not need beauty arranged in a vase.
She needed someone to remember her medication schedule.
Someone to make sure she ate.
Someone to stay awake if her fever rose.
At the register, an older cashier looked at the items and asked, “Taking care of somebody?”
I looked through the glass doors at Sophie waiting in the car.
“Trying to,” I said.
And for the first time in months, I meant it without excuse.
Her apartment building was an old brick walk-up with browned ivy clinging to the walls.
The lobby smelled faintly of detergent, dust, and someone’s dinner.
Sophie insisted she could manage the stairs.
By the second landing, her face had gone pale.
I offered my arm without speaking.
For a stubborn second, she ignored it.
Then she took it.
Her hand was light on my sleeve.
That small touch carried more trust than I deserved.
At her door, she fumbled with the keys.
One key still had the little house-shaped keychain we bought years ago at a street fair.
We had laughed when we bought it because we did not own a house yet.
We only had a dream of one.
A dream with a porch.
A tiny garden.
A yellow nursery neither of us dared mention after the second loss.
The apartment was small but unmistakably hers.
