Helen told Sophie the truth. Not all of it. The version a twelve-year-old could hold. She told Sophie she had a twin brother who lived with her parents in another state. She told Sophie the separation had happened when they were very young. She told Sophie the reasons were complicated and that the reasons did not reflect anyone’s love but rather the limits of what love could do when the resources were not sufficient.
Sophie told Nate she had wanted to contact him for years. She told him she did not contact him because she did not know whether he knew she existed, and a woman who contacts a brother who does not know she exists is a woman who detonates a family’s secret without the family’s permission, and Sophie had spent her life being careful about the structures she moved through because the first structure she was placed inside, the family, had collapsed beneath her at three.
