Her throat works, but she makes herself hold your gaze. “No. I let you walk away thinking I had betrayed you in the worst possible way because by then, I believed maybe I had.”
The sentence is so tangled it almost offends you. “What does that even mean?”
She gestures toward the kitchen table. “Sit down. Please. If you leave now, you’ll leave with the wrong story. Again.”
That word again lands like a stone between you.
You don’t want to sit. You want to demand DNA tests, dates, records, whatever evidence exists in the wreckage she’s now opened. But anger has always been easiest when it faces a simple villain, and Sofía no longer looks simple. She looks like someone who has been waiting years for a verdict. You pull out a chair and sit anyway, every muscle tense.
