What the Twins Found at the Same Table
Nate and Sophie met in person six weeks after the phone call.
The meeting was in Grand Rapids. At Sophie’s house. Because the house where a woman builds her life after being sent away as a child is the house that represents who she became rather than where she started, and the meeting deserved to be held inside the becoming rather than the starting.
I drove with Nate. We left the children with my mother. The drive was seven hours. Nate did not speak for the first three. Not because he was silent the way Sophie was silent at three, the silence of a voice that has been severed. Because he was silent the way a man is silent when he is driving toward the person he has been half of since before birth and who was removed from beside him before the memory could solidify, and the driving is closing a distance that should never have existed.
