Page 75 of The Someday Daughter
I feel my eyebrows twitch together. I’ve spent my whole life thinkingLettersactually has nothing to do with me, but after Nashville and Ethan and these two months with my mom, it feels at least a little closer to true. And our show tonight was good—we fake it so well now that I’m not sure we’re faking it at all.
I press my thumb to my pointer finger. “And?”
“Well.” Sadie hesitates, then finally looks into my eyes. “Audrey, I think Camilla might’ve written the book about me.”
48
My eyes rake over Sadie: her jeans, her gold wedding band, her neat, familiar ponytail. The same safe, reliable person she’s been all summer long. “Excuse me?”
“Do you want to sit?” she asks, gesturing to one of the baby chairs.
“No.” I’m running my thumb over all my fingertips in turn. Not even counting, just using the motion of it to keep myself still.
“Audrey.” Silas takes a step toward me, but I can’t rip my eyes off Sadie. “Please sit.”
“I don’t want to sit. Tell me what’s going on.”
Sadie glances at Silas before looking back at me. “Okay,” she says, drawing a deep breath. “Your mom had another daughter. Sixteen years before you.”
I realize that I’m shaking my head, and make myself stop.
“When she was twenty,” Sadie says. She takes a step closer to me, and I mirror it with a step back. It smells like cardboard and school supplies in here. “She gave her up for adoption. It was—” Sadie hesitates, lifts her hands to her own chest like she can’t manage to speak the wordme.
“No,” I say, but Sadie keeps going.
“I got the court records when I was eighteen.” When I’m silent, she says, “The book came out when I was nine—seven years before you were born. When I found out who she was, I sent a letter asking if we could meet. But she didn’t want to meet.”
“She didn’t want to meet,” I repeat, my voice flat.
“The response was from her team,” Sadie says. “But that’s what it said.”
Her team.Magnolia.
“It’s not true,” I say. “She would have told me.” But even as I speak, I feel something clicking into place: The black hole of my mother beforeLetters to My Someday Daughter, her life before the limelight that she never talks about. Sadie’s notes inLetters—all those annotations about making your own choices about parenthood, about the “context” of my mother’s life while she was writing, about her response—“With Audrey?”—when Sadie asked for her birth story. And the book’s dedication,To her.Always allegedly about me, though I didn’t exist to be “her” when she wrote it.
People describe rooms as spinning, when your whole life tips on its axis. But nothing spins around me—it’s like I melt in the center of it all instead. Like I’m something less human than I was before I heard this, my atoms ceasing to exist the way they used to.
“Wouldshe have told you?” Sadie says, and I squeeze my fisted hand so tightly the tendons over my knuckles ache. “Audrey—”
“Does my mom know who you are?”
“No.” Sadie shakes her head. “I didn’t identify myself in the letter. I didn’t want her to know who I was unless she wanted to know me—and she didn’t. I was hoping to talk to her before talking to you, but, well...”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. My brain throbs inside my skull. I look at Silas, a hot sear of pain, and quickly away. “How did you—why are you here?”
Sadie looks at Silas. I know, even before he speaks, that what he says is going to wreck me.
“When Camilla offered the tour jobs to American, I—” He stops, swallows. Steadies himself. “I thought it would be good for Sadie to get closure. To meet her biological—”
“You did this?” My voice comes out hoarse. This summer bleeds behind my eyes: that back alley in LA, when I thought Silas and I were strangers but he knew exactly who I was. The doctors Sadie introduced me to, not because she saw promise in me but because—what, we’rerelated? And the way Silas and Sadie must have compared notes at every stop along the way. Poring over that book together, talking about me and my mother and the specimens of us that they came here to study.
I take another step back from him, toward the door. My voice is low and broken. “You knew, and you kept it from me all this time.”
I watch Silas’s face fall. “Audrey, please.” He reaches for me, and I shrink away. “Please don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you don’t recognize me.”
