Still.
The kind of still that comes before a horse bolts or a woman decides which part of a man’s heart to cut first.
“Who lied to me?” she asks.
Becki closes her eyes.
Royal reaches her side and puts a hand near her back, not touching until she leans into it. That is the only reason I don’t tell him to get her out of here. Becki is shaking now, and whatever this confession costs Sophie, it’s costing Becki too.
“I’m sorry,” Becki whispers. “I thought I could keep it buried because it was old and ugly and before you, but then all this started happening. Pearly Gates. Missing girls. Cider. Secrets. Babies.” Her hand spreads over her belly. “And now I’m carrying this one, and I keep thinking if I keep lying, God will take this baby from me too.”
Sophie’s face drains.
My chest locks.
Becki looks at her.
“We did lose a baby,” she says. “Me and Legend. A long time ago.”
The words hit the room and kill every sound in it.
Sophie doesn’t move.
No one does.
Even Cornbread is silent near the clubhouse bar.
I hear my own blood in my ears. Old grief crawls up from the place I buried it, mean and familiar. A baby that never got a name out loud. A mistake wrapped in youth and anger and all the ways people hurt each other when they don’t know how to love. Becki and me were fire and gasoline back then, and what burned out of us left scars neither one of us knew how to talk about.
Sophie looks at me.
Not Becki.
Me.
Her voice is soft when she asks, “Is that true?”
I could lie.
I have already done that.
Not with words maybe. Not straight to her face. But omission is a lie with nicer shoes, and I know it. I knew it every time Becki’s name came up. Every time Sophie asked if there was anything else she needed to know about the past. Every time I told myself it was buried, that it belonged to before, that dragging it up would only hurt people who had already bled enough.
I look at the woman I love.
“Yes.”
Her face changes.
I have seen Sophie angry. I have seen her afraid. I have seen her stand in front of men twice her size and make them look away first.
I have never seen her look at me like this.
Like I just made her feel stupid for trusting me.
“You lied to me,” she says.
“Soph.”