“No. It doesn’t.”
She leaned against him.
“I’m glad you got smarter.”
That was Sophie.
She could make us cry and laugh within the same minute.
She loved strawberry milkshakes, old songs, ridiculous jokes and sunsets. She hated hospitals but loved nurses. Every birthday she insisted that we take too many photographs because, as she once told me, “Pictures are how you make a day stay.”
Sophie reached her sixteenth birthday.
By then, her health had become more fragile, and we knew time was changing.
But she refused to let every conversation become about illness.
On her sixteenth birthday, she made Daniel buy seventeen candles.
“You’re sixteen,” he reminded her.
“I know.”
“Then why seventeen?”
She grinned.
“One for next year. I’m reserving it.”
Daniel turned away because he didn’t want her to see him cry.
Several months later, Sophie was admitted to the hospital.
