Page 3 of Trying Sophie

Chapter One

Sophie

Following a particularlyterrible blind date with a man named Samuel who was more interested in my money than getting to know me, I climbed the stairs to the flat I was subletting in Edinburgh’s New Town.

Not more than 20 minutes into our meal, Samuel began asking questions that were entirely too personal for what I considered a getting-to-know-you conversation. When I balked at providing him with an up-close-and-personal look at my finances, he lost interest altogether. Instead of politely wrapping up the date like someone with good manners would have done, he pulled out his iPhone to text with his friends. Continuously.

The sound of the notifications pinging on his phone still rang through my ears.

When the jackass had stepped outside to take a “very important phone call,” he hadn’t returned, leaving me to pay for both of our meals and the very expensive bottle of red wine he’d ordered. As if his ditching me wasn’t insult enough, I didn’t even drink wine all that often. I’d ended up gifting the bottle to the couple sitting next to me; a couple I couldn’t help but notice appeared deeply in love.

God, I hated people in love. Okay, not really. Just sometimes. Like when my love life was shit, which was pretty much constantly.

Needless to say, the night was not going my way.

Now all I could think about was getting out of my fancy date clothes and in to my pajamas for a night on the couch watching Gossip Girl on Netflix. Serena van der Woodsen never had these sorts of problems, I thought as reached the top step of the fourth floor walkup.

As I hefted my tired, achy feet up the last step, my phone chimed U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” the song I’d programmed as the ring tone for my mom.

Madeline Fitzgerald Newport Hodges was a born and bred Irish lass with the pale, freckled skin and naturally red hair that went along with it. And yet despite her obvious ancestry, she’d devoted the last 28 years to pretending she hadn’t grown up above a pub just outside of Dublin. Now a stunning middle-aged woman who looked young enough to be my older sister, she’d managed to mostly disguise the accent she’d arrived with in the late 1980s.

“Hey mom,” I said into the phone as I struggled to get the large brass Chubb key to turn in the ancient lock.

Being American, the key had looked cool when my friend handed it over with instructions on its finicky nature, but over the last several weeks I’d learned first-hand what a pain in the ass it could be when it came time to actually use the thing. Not to mention how much heavier it made my key ring.

“Dammit,” I muttered under my breath as I fumbled and it clanged loudly to the floor. “Hold on,” I said, crouching down to pick up my keys before wrestling it into the lock and turning with all my might.

Finally!

Once the door opened, I gathered up my belongings and brought the phone back to my ear. “Sorry about that, mom. What’s up?”

“Is everything alright, Sophie?”

“Yeah, I was just having technical difficulties with these damn locks.”

“Language,” she admonished.

I let out a huff, not deigning to acknowledge the reprimand. If I wasn’t allowed to say damn we were going to have a huge problem because my day had been pretty shitty. I had a lot of expletives building up I was itching to use.

“So,” I said, changing the subject. “What’s up?”

“Can’t a mother call her only daughter without having a reason?”

“Yes, they can. But you usually don’t.”

“I hate how cynical you’ve become. I didn’t raise you to be that way.”

“Yes, mom, you did. Until you met Geoffrey you were the most cynical person I’d ever known.”

“That’s not fair and you know it. I went through hell with your father and I did what I had to in order to make sure nothing like that ever happened to me again.”

“I think you mean us, mom. Happened to us.”

The fact that I often had to remind her their divorce had left me without a father was a point of continued contention. Me, me, me was pretty much how my mom chose to go through life, and even though we’d had this discussion numerous times before, she refused to acknowledge the impact the dissolution of their marriage had on my life as well. She may have lost a husband, but I’d effectively lost a whole family in their divorce. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I’d reconnected with a few of my Pittsburgh cousins via Facebook, and then my paternal grandparents only once I’d turned 18 and came into my first trust. And I was still trying to forge some sort of tentative relationship with the man who’d walked out on us. Long gone were the days of “daddy.” Now he was simply “Langston” to me, as if we had no familial connection to speak of. As if I didn’t have his green eyes, or his height, or coloring. You know, as if I didn’t look exactly like a female version of the man he’d been when he’d married my mom way back when.

“You know what I mean dear.”

It had taken me a long time to read between the lines of what my mom said or didn’t say, but at 26 I could finally decipher her language. “You know what I mean dear,” had become her go-to statement whenever she knew she was in the wrong but didn’t want to admit it.

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