Part 5 — What We Found
I want to tell you the part that still gives me chills, even now, before anything else.
Ellie and Sophie had met before. Twice.
Ellie plays cello in our county’s youth symphony. Sophie — the daughter Diane raised, my biological daughter — plays violin in the youth symphony one county over. The two groups had performed together at the regional youth music festival two years running. Ellie came home both times talking about “this violin girl from the other district who’s insanely good” — a girl she’d complimented in a hallway after their sets, exchanged a few words with, and never thought about again.
When I finally showed Ellie a photo of Sophie, she went pale and grabbed her phone, scrolling back through two-year-old camera roll photos until she found it: a blurry group shot from a regional music festival, both girls standing four feet apart, neither one having any idea who the other one was.
“I talked to her,” Ellie kept saying, staring at the photo like it might rearrange itself into something that made sense. “Mom, I talked to her. Twice. I told her she played beautifully.”
