The wife he left behind
“I think tomorrow, when I talk to Sophia, we need to actually map the whole thing out properly. From Hope, all the way to now. I think we need to see, finally, the entire shape of what happened to this family over a hundred years.”
They worked through the following morning on a video call, Sophia’s careful handwriting filling page after page as the two of them built the family tree out loud together, branch by branch, the way they’d built the original chair plan years earlier.
“Hope had to have children,” Sophia said slowly, working through it. “Or grandchildren. Because the name Eleanor keeps showing up, generations apart, in completely separate branches of the family. That only happens if
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