I Came Home in Secret to Catch the Woman I Trusted. The Cameras Revealed the Monster Had Been Sleeping Beside Me.105
Maria.
Sophie.
Then I looked toward the garden, where the girls had spent most of the summer planting flowers badly and proudly.
“Windows,” I said.
“How many?”
I smiled.
“As many as you can fit.”
Three months later, there wasn’t a security room behind the garage anymore.
There was sunlight.
A wall of glass.
Two desks.
A piano nobody played particularly well.
Shelves filled with books.
Lily called it the sunshine room.
Emma pretended the name was childish, then wrote it on a sign anyway.
Maria placed Sophie’s photograph on one shelf.
In it, Sophie was laughing.
Not posing.
Not perfect.
Alive.
I often stopped in front of it.
Sometimes I still apologized.
For missing things.
For trusting the wrong people.
For not understanding sooner.
Then I remembered what she had told me.
Trust is not stupidity.
Love is not failure.
One afternoon, Emma caught me staring at the photograph.
She came beside me.
“You miss her?”
“Every day.”
“Me too.”
We stood together.
Then she asked, “Do you think Mom would like the room?”
I looked at all the windows.
At Lily asleep on a beanbag.
At Maria watering a plant she insisted we were all killing.
At Bunny sitting crookedly on the piano.
“Yes.”
Emma smiled.
“Why?”
I put my arm around her.
“Because there are no places left to hide.”
And for the first time since the morning Sophie died, that was true.
