CHAPTER 3

Sophie’s POV

I stood there in the pouring rain without an umbrella, soaking wet within seconds, and I thought about everything that had happened today from the moment I woke up to this exact moment and I almost laughed. Almost. The sound that came out wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite a cry. It was something in between that I had no name for.

I started walking. I didn't know what else to do. I was just so tired. Tired of waiting for buses and tired of cold houses and tired of being invisible and tired of being strong and quiet and useful. I was tired all the way down to my bones.

The rain poured down and soaked through my coat and my shoes and my hair stuck flat against my face and I kept walking.

Then the headache hit me.

Not the usual throbbing I had been living with for weeks. This was different. This was a white hot spike of pain behind my eyes so sudden and so sharp that my legs buckled. I grabbed a lamppost with both hands and held on and waited for the world to stop tilting. My vision went blurry at the edges. My knees were shaking.

A car slowed down beside me.

It was a large dark car, expensive looking, the kind that moved quietly and cost more than most people made in a year. It pulled up slowly and stopped and the door opened.

The man who got out was tall with dark hair plastered slightly by the rain and eyes that were a strange shade of grey, like steel, like storm clouds. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than everything in my wardrobe combined. He reached back into the car and came toward me with an umbrella already open and held it over my head without asking permission.

We stood there for a second. The rain hammered down on the umbrella above us. I was dripping onto the pavement and I was sure I looked absolutely terrible. Blotchy face. Wet hair. Shaking hands still gripping the lamppost.

"Can I give you a ride?" he asked. His voice was calm and even. He wasn't looking at me with pity exactly. More like a quiet kind of concern.

"I'm fine," I said. "Thank you."

"It's pouring," he said simply.

"I noticed." I tried to sound steady. I wasn't sure it worked.

I looked at his car and I thought about standing in the rain for another forty minutes waiting for the next bus. I thought about Derek and Rosa sitting at that dinner table. I thought about Dr. Elliot's voice saying three months.

What was the worst that could happen, I thought. I was going to die anyway.

"Okay," I said. "Thank you."

He opened the back door for me and waited. I got in. He closed the door gently, walked around to the driver's side and got in.

"I'm so sorry," I said immediately. I was dripping all over the leather seat. My wet coat was leaving a dark patch everywhere it touched. "Your car. I'm getting water everywhere."

"It's just water," he said. He didn't sound annoyed. He reached back and picked up his jacket from the seat and held it out toward me.

I stared at it. "I can't take your jacket."

"You're shivering," he said.

I was. I hadn't realized how badly until he said it. My hands were trembling in my lap and my teeth were close to chattering.

I took the jacket. It was warm and heavy and smelled faintly of something expensive. I pulled it around my shoulders and closed my eyes for just a second.

The car moved and my mind drifted back to Dr. Elliot's office before I could stop it. The file on the desk. The careful way he had said three months. The number he had given me for the treatment cost. The quiet terrible arithmetic of my situation turning itself over and over in my head.

The ride was short. Too short for everything I was trying not to think about.

The car slowed and stopped and I looked up and we were outside the house. Derek's house. My house. The building I had lived in for two years and never once felt at home in.

The lights were on inside. They were already home.

"Thank you," I said. "Really. You didn't have to do that."

He nodded once. Simple and easy like it was nothing.

I remembered the jacket around my shoulders and reached up to take it off. "Here. Let me—"

"Keep it," he said.

"I can't keep your jacket."

"You can give it back another time," he said. There was something almost like a small smile at the corner of his mouth. "Keep it for tonight."

I didn't have the energy to argue. I thanked him again and got out and walked up the front steps. I heard his car pull away behind me.

I stood at the front door for a moment with my hand on the handle and his jacket around my wet shoulders and braced myself for whatever was waiting on the other side.

Then I stopped.

I turned around slowly and looked at the empty street.

He was gone.

I stood there in the rain thinking about it. I had never told him my address. I had gotten into his car soaking wet and barely holding myself together and I had said almost nothing and somehow he had driven me directly here.

He knew where I lived.

And I didn't even know his name. Who was he and how had he known where I lived?

There was no time to ponder on that. I had dinner to make.

I turned back to the front door and walked in.

I didn't have time to change. I didn't have time to think. I just needed to get to the kitchen and start dinner before seven. I walked fast down the hallway still dripping, still wearing the jacket over my wet clothes, my shoes squeaking against the floor with every step.

I pushed open the kitchen door and stopped.

Shirley was standing at the counter. Lana was beside her, Derek's younger sister, leaning against the refrigerator with her arms crossed. They both turned when I came in.

Their faces shifted the moment they saw me. Shirley's eyes moved from my wet hair to my soaked clothes to the jacket around my shoulders and her expression hardened into something cold and sharp.

"Where exactly are you coming from?" she asked. "At this hour. Looking like that."

"I was at the hospital," I said. "It started raining and I missed the bus—"

"Whose jacket is that?" Lana cut in. She was looking at the jacket the way you look at evidence. A slow smile spread across her face. Not a kind smile.

"Someone gave me a ride. It was raining, I didn't have an umbrella—"

Lana laughed. "Someone gave you a ride." She looked at her mother. "Did you hear that?"

"I heard," Shirley said.

"I saw the car," Lana said, looking back at me. The smile was still there but her eyes were mean. "Very nice car. So who is he? How long has that been going on?"

"Nothing is going on," I said. "He was a stranger. He just offered me a ride because I was caught in the rain. That is all that happened."

"A stranger," Shirley repeated slowly. She said the word like it tasted bad. "A strange man. Driving you home. And you got in his car." She looked at me with complete contempt. "What kind of woman does that?"

"I was soaking wet and my head was—"

"What kind of woman," Shirley said again, louder this time, "accepts a jacket from a man who is not her husband and gets into his car?"

"Mom is being polite," Lana said casually, examining her nails. "I'll just say it. You're a whore."

The word landed hard. I opened my mouth.

"Don't," Shirley said. Her voice dropped very low. "Don't you dare stand in my son's house and try to explain yourself to me."

"I wasn't doing anything wrong," I said quietly. "I just needed a ride home. I was sick and it was raining and I had just come from the doctor and I—"

The slap came so fast I didn't see it.