“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
His voice had changed.
He unfolded the clipping fully and read the names beneath the photograph of Sophie’s biological parents.
His face shifted.
“Isabella.”
Sophie looked up.
“That was my first mommy.”
Mr. Harris gripped the edge of the desk.
“Your mother’s name was Isabella?”
“Yes, Isabella.”
He stared at her.
Something suddenly clicked.
Mr. Harris glanced around the classroom, as though remembering twenty children were watching.
Then he turned to me.
“Could you and Sophie come to my office, please?”
Mrs. Parker started to speak.
“You too,” he said.
Minutes later, Sophie sat beside me in the principal’s office, holding my hand.
Mr. Harris closed the door and crouched in front of her.
“Was your mother’s name Isabella H before she got married?”
Sophie’s fingers tightened around mine.
“I don’t know.”
But I did.
I’d seen the name on documents years earlier.
“Yes,” I said.
Mr. Harris closed his eyes.
When he opened them, they were wet.
“Isabella was my sister.”
Sophie stared at him.
I thought I’d misheard.
“What?”
“My older sister.”
He pointed toward the clipping.
“That’s my sister.”
Mrs. Parker slowly sat down.
Mr. Harris was focused entirely on Sophie.
“She left home when I was 16. I knew she got married. Years later, my father told me she’d had a baby girl.”
His voice broke.
“A girl named Sophie.”
I couldn’t speak.
Sophie could.
“Me?”
Mr. Harris nodded.
“You.”
She stared at him.
“Then what are you?”
The innocence of the question seemed to break something in him.
“I’m your uncle.”
Sophie looked at me, then back at him.
“My real uncle?”
“Your biological uncle,” I said carefully.
Then he immediately looked at me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No.” I squeezed Sophie’s hand. “Uncle is fine.”
Mr. Harris sat on the floor, no longer seeming to care that he was the principal.
“I’ve wondered where you were for seven years.”
That hit me harder than anything else.
“Wait.”
I looked at the clipping.
The half-visible face.
The name Harris.
And suddenly, I remembered something from years earlier.
A gray-haired man standing on our porch with a cardboard box.
“Oh, my God.”
Mr. Harris looked at me.
“Richard.”
“What?”
“I met your father.”
He stood so quickly the chair behind him scraped the floor.
