He exhaled.
“Sophia.”
She looked up.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t show up after ten years and look at me like this was just bad timing.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Then what was it?”
She opened her mouth.
Nothing came.
Ethan nodded.
“Exactly.”
He turned again.
Sophia caught him with words this time.
“My mother was dying.”
He stopped.
Traffic hissed through rain behind them.
Ethan turned slowly.
“What?”
Sophia stood beside the red sedan, no longer looking like a millionaire CEO.
No longer polished.
Just wet and frightened.
“My mother.”
“She got sick three months before I left.”
Ethan remembered.
Sophia’s mother, Evelyn.
Kind woman.
Quiet.
Unlike Sophia’s father.
Ethan had known she had health problems.
Not the extent.
Sophia continued:
“It was autoimmune at first.”
“Then organ complications.”
“She needed treatment in Switzerland.”
“Experimental.”
“Expensive.”
Ethan stared.
“You never told me.”
“I wasn’t allowed.”
“What does that mean?”
“My father controlled everything.”
“Insurance.”
“Accounts.”
“Doctors.”
“Travel.”
Ethan’s jaw tightened.
“He knew about us?”
Sophia nodded.
“When?”
“Almost from the beginning.”
“And?”
“At first he thought it was a phase.”
“Then I told him I wanted to move out.”
Sophia’s voice began trembling.
“I told him I loved you.”
Ethan looked away.
Hearing that after ten years felt almost physically painful.
Sophia continued.
“He said if I left with you, he would stop paying for my mother’s treatment.”
Ethan turned sharply.
“What?”
“I thought he was bluffing.”
“He showed me the paperwork.”
“He had already cancelled one consultation.”
Sophia wiped rain from her face.
Or tears.
Ethan could no longer tell.
“He said I had twenty-four hours.”
“End it.”
“Leave Colorado.”
“Join the family company.”
“No contact with you.”
“Or my mother came home.”
Ethan’s anger moved direction.
Not away.
Just elsewhere.
“You could have told me.”
“I wanted to.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because you would have tried to fix it.”
“Damn right.”
“And you couldn’t.”
The bluntness stopped him.
Sophia stepped closer.
“You were twenty-seven.”
“You had four hundred dollars in savings.”
“A motorcycle.”
“An apartment whose heater barely worked.”
“And more courage than sense.”
Despite everything, Ethan almost smiled.
Sophia did not.
“If I told you, you would have come after my father.”
“You might have gone to the press.”
“Or a lawyer.”
“Or tried borrowing money we could never repay.”
“And while we fought him, my mother could have died.”
“So you disappeared.”
“I chose her.”
The sentence broke slightly.
“I chose keeping my mother alive.”