Part 2: What Sophie Saw
It had been just after nine in the morning, before most of the family arrived.
Sophie had come downstairs for a glass of water and stopped at the bottom of the stairs when she heard voices in the kitchen — her father and Grandma Eleanor, talking in the low, tense way adults used when they thought no one was listening.
She couldn't make out all the words. Something about money. Something about the house. Her father's voice went quiet and tired in the way it did when he was trying not to get upset, and Eleanor's voice had that edge to it — that particular sharpness that Sophie had learned, over eight years, to be afraid of.
Then she heard the small plastic rattle of a pill bottle.
She peeked around the doorframe.
She saw her grandmother pick up the orange bottle from the counter. She saw Eleanor look at it for a moment — really look at it, turning it in her hands — and then, without a word, drop it into the open mouth of her large designer handbag. The Louis Vuitton one. The one she carried everywhere and guarded like it contained state secrets.
The clasp snapped shut.
Eleanor turned back to Sophie's father, and their conversation continued, and Thomas never noticed.
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Sophie stood in the doorway with her glass of water and her heart beating very fast.
She was eight. She didn't fully understand what she had witnessed or why. But she knew what she saw. She knew the pills went into that purse. And some quiet, instinctive part of her knew that saying so was going to cause a problem.
