Chapter Two: An Impossible Demand

Sophia POV

The cab smells like old vinyl and someone else's perfume. My car is still wherever I left it after the hotel. I don't care.

I don't remember giving the driver an address. I just know I can't go back to the apartment Julian and I shared, so I give him mine instead — the old studio I never quite let go of, the one with a bed I haven't slept in for months. He drops me at the curb and I let myself in still wearing the red dress, and I sit down on the edge of a stripped mattress in the dark because I don't have the strength to turn on a light.

My phone starts buzzing before I've even set my keys down. Vivian's name flashes and disappears, flashes and disappears, over and over, and each time I let it ring out I feel a small, mean flicker of relief, like I've found the one door in my life I'm still allowed to close tonight. I have exactly one night off left before my next shift, and I had promised myself I would spend it grieving quietly, alone, where no one could watch me do it.

She doesn't allow me that either.

By the fifth or sixth call I stop counting. My cheek still remembers the cool hotel wall I pressed my palm against hours ago, and Julian's voice keeps replaying under everything else — the wet sound, the woman's laugh, the way neither of them stopped when the door swung open. I sit very still in the dark and let the phone ring itself out again and again, telling myself that whatever this is, it can wait until morning. It has never once, in my whole life, been able to wait until morning.

The calls finally stop. A single voicemail notification blinks up at me instead, and something about the silence afterward is worse than the ringing was. I tell myself I won't listen to it. I listen to it anyway.

My mother's voice comes through so loud, so raw with fury, that I have to yank the phone away from my ear. "You ungrateful, selfish girl — do you have any idea what's happening in this house while you hide from your own family? Get here. Now. If I have to come find you myself, you will regret it for the rest of your life."

The line clicks dead. My hands are shaking by the time it finishes, not from fear exactly, or not only that — from the particular exhaustion of a body that has nothing left to brace with. I've been broken by two people I love in the same night now, one with a bed and one with a voice, and there is nowhere left to hide from either.

I get up. I don't change out of the red dress — there isn't time, and some small, punishing part of me doesn't think I deserve to.

*****

The house is lit when I pull up with the cab man. My sister Emily's car sits in the driveway, parked like she didn't have the patience to line it up properly. I walk up the steps on legs that feel borrowed. The door opens before I knock.

The slap comes before I've even crossed the threshold.

My head snaps sideways so hard I stumble into the doorframe, ear ringing, and I taste copper before I've fully registered that Vivian's hand is still raised. "You ignore me," she says, voice shaking with something colder than anger. "You ignore me for hours, on the one night this family needed you, and you think you can just walk in here?"

"I was…"

"I don't want to hear a single word out of your mouth." The second slap comes from the other side, snapping my head back the way it came, and this one has enough weight behind it that my knees actually buckle. I catch myself against the doorframe. She doesn't stop. Her hand closes into my hair and she shakes me once, hard, like she's trying to rattle something loose. "You selfish, ungrateful girl. You have always put yourself ahead of this family. Ahead of your own blood."

I don't raise my hand to my face, and I don't pull away from her grip, either. I've learned not to; it only ever made her angrier, like flinching itself was an accusation. I stand there with my scalp burning and my vision swimming at the edges, both cheeks hot now, and let her finish, because some old, exhausted part of me still believes that if I just take it quietly enough, it will end sooner.

She shoves me back a step and finally lets go, breathing hard, like the violence has cost her something too — though not enough to stop her, not tonight. My ears are still ringing loud enough to swallow the first few words of whatever she says next.

Inside the sitting room, Lily is on the couch in Emily's lap, small and pale under a thin blanket. I kneel down and realize she's asleep, worn thin enough that even her own aunt kneeling beside her doesn't reach her. The tiny, useless tenderness of the gesture undoes something in my chest, and I have to blink hard against the sting building behind my eyes.

"The latest match failed," Emily says, not looking at me, rocking Lily without pause. "They called an hour ago. No compatibility." Her eyes lift, and the grief in them sharpens into something colder. "You'd know that if you ever answered your phone."

"They said we keep looking." Her jaw tightens. "That's all they ever say. Meanwhile you get to go home every night and sleep just fine, don't you?"

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" Her laugh is short and bitter. "You've had a hand in every failed test for two years, Sophia. I'm the one who has to watch Lily get weaker."

I nod anyway, throat tight, refusing to let her bait me. "We'll expand the search again. There are still registries we haven't fully…"

Vivian's voice cuts across the room, sharp and cold. "Do you even realize your niece is dying?"

I stand. "I've done every medical test possible. I've never stopped trying to save her."

Her expression hardens. "Not enough."

"What more do you expect from me?"

"This is all you owe your sister." Vivian doesn't raise her voice this time. She doesn't need to. Every word lands flat and final, like something she decided a long time ago and has only been waiting for the right moment to say. "If it weren't for you, your sister wouldn't be unable to have children."

The room goes very quiet. Even Emily's rocking stops.

"Don't you dare stand there and act like having a child for her is some enormous sacrifice." Her eyes don't blink. "You should be willing to die for her. That's the least of what you owe this family."

"What?" The word comes out of me smaller than I mean it to.

"You heard me."

"No." It comes out of me before I've thought it through. "No. I am not having a child as a — as a spare parts donor, Mother, that is not…"

"How dare you." Vivian's voice cracks across the room like the slap did. The blow that follows is worse than either of the first two — her palm catching me full across the same raw cheek, hard enough that the room actually tilts, white sparking at the edge of my vision. I hear myself make a sound I don't recognize. "After everything this family has given you," she says, like she hasn't just done it, like her hand isn't still raised. "After everything your sister has lost. You would deny her this?"

I press my palm flat against my cheek, and that's when the tears finally come — not quiet ones, not the kind I can blink back this time, but hot and fast and humiliating, running before I can stop them. "I'm not denying her anything," I say, and my voice breaks halfway through it, thick with crying even as I force the words out. "I'm telling you it wouldn't even work." My hand stays pressed to my face, cradling the ache, and I keep going anyway, because some small stubborn thing in me refuses to let this one slide past unchallenged, even through the tears. "A child of mine would be Lily's cousin. First cousins are rarely a match for something like this — you'd be putting a baby through invasive testing for a chance barely better than a stranger's. I am a medical doctor, I've done the reading. I've done the math. This isn't how compatibility works."

Something flickers across Vivian's face — not surprise, exactly. Calculation. Like I've said the thing she was already prepared for.

"That's why," she says slowly, "it wouldn't be just anyone."

I go still, my palm still pressed to my burning cheek, tears sliding hot and unchecked down over my fingers now. "What are you talking about?"

"There's a man," she says, and there's something almost satisfied in the way she says it, like she's been holding this piece back just to watch it land. "Someone I can recommend. If you had a child with him, the odds would be very different. Far better than you think."

Cold moves through me, slower and worse than the slap, worse than the tears I can't stop. "Different how?" My voice cracks around it. "Mother, what does that even mean…"

"You'll marry him," she says, as if I haven't spoken at all, as if the tears streaming down my face are simply not there to see. "And you'll give him a child, and that child will very likely be what saves Lily's life. It's the only real chance this family has left."

"Who?" It barely makes it out of me, thin and wrecked. "Who are you talking about?"

Vivian doesn't blink.

"Ethan Vale — Emily's brother-in-law."

The name lands in the room and doesn't move. Somewhere behind me, Emily makes a small sound and Lily shifts in her sleep, murmuring something too soft to catch.

I don't answer. I look at Emily once more, hoping for something—anything that isn’t the same flat, expectant patient Vivian is wearing and find nothing. My hand is still pressed to my cheek, my face wet, my chest so full of things I have no room left to hold any of them — not the grief, not the fury, not the small cornered animal thing clawing up my throat telling me to move.

So I move. I turn and I go, past Vivian, past the couch, past whatever Emily is trying to say to my back, out through the still-open front door and down the steps into the night, no coat, no plan, no idea where my feet are even taking me.

I just run, in a red dress and bare arms, into the dark, away from all of it.