What Happened to Sophie Wilder Read Online Free Page B

that morning. He was headed home in a few hours.
    â€œHow about you?”

    After several years of spending breaks in New York with the Blakemans, she was back to having no place to go when campus shut down, since she wasn’t speaking to Charlie. She didn’t say this, of course. She just told him she was hanging around for the week.
    â€œYou could come with me, if you want,” he said. “There’s plenty of room at the family house, and we’re always happy for visitors.”
    He seemed to speak without thinking. She was against character types in theory but found them useful practically, and she told herself that she knew this type. He had taken a chance on a spontaneous invitation that might get him lucky over the break. She preferred believing this to believing that an actual act of kindness was being extended. She didn’t want to admit that right then she so badly needed a place for herself in the world that she would accept such kindness from a near stranger, but she could strike a more balanced deal.
    His name, Tom O’Brien, was nearly all she knew of him, so she pictured a large Irish brood: garrulous raconteur father and smiling mother who played at being put upon though everyone understood she was really in charge, endless brothers and sisters and indistinguishable cousins, perhaps a set of twins somewhere among them, amid all of which the odd friend from school might easily be lost. On the drive down—home, it happened, was in southern Jersey, just a few hours from New Hampton—she asked about his family.
    â€œGive me some notes,” she said, “so I know who everyone is.”
    â€œOh, it’s just me and Beth.”
    â€œBeth?”
    â€œMy mother’s sister, Beth O’Brien. She raised me.”

    â€œYour parents?” Sophie asked.
    â€œNot around.”
    â€œMine either,” she said, suspecting he already knew as much. “Picnic, lightning.”
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œCar crash,” she explained. “Very literary. How about yours?”
    â€œThey died in a fire,” Tom said. Or so Sophie would remember it. Perhaps he said they were “lost” or “taken” or some other construction that was honest in the strictest semantic sense, but he clearly suggested that both his parents had been killed. He’d taken the name O’Brien after coming to live with Beth at the age of eight. Another orphan, Sophie thought. As if absence created vacuums that pulled them to each other. It was, in retrospect, a very intimate conversation for two people who had more or less just met. But this was during a time when life seemed to Sophie a series of such intimacies, her losses extended like a hand to be shaken upon introduction.
    â€œSo it will be the three of us?”
    â€œIs that all right?”
    â€œI just hope I’m not intruding.”
    â€œNot at all. Like I told you, Beth loves visitors.”
    They stopped on the way to eat dinner, and it was late by the time they arrived at the small, two-story Queen Anne Victorian, one in a row of houses in similar style, with a wraparound porch and a tower along its right side that extended above the roof. The porch light was on, and Tom’s aunt opened the door before they had finished pulling into the driveway. She was surprisingly beautiful, with pale skin and reddish blond hair that curled slightly toward her thin face. Only her outfit—a shapeless floral dress that ran to the ground—suggested the spinster aunt Sophie had been
imagining for the last hour of their drive. When Tom introduced them, Beth took Sophie into a light but real embrace.
    Tom and Beth led her to a small guest room on the first floor, where Sophie unpacked the few things she’d thrown together after lunch. She was anxious about spending the next week with strangers, and she didn’t really understand their eagerness to take her in. There were shelves along one wall,