Page 26 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

Raphael raises his. I raise mine. We drink.

The wine is extraordinary. I don’t have the vocabulary for it the way Killian probably does or Maddox definitely does, but I know that it’s the kind of thing that makes you close your eyes on the first sip and just stay there for a second. I’ve been doing that with most of the wine here, actually. It’s becoming a problem in the best possible way.

Lorenzo pushes back from the table. “Another bottle?”

“Obviously,” Sophia says.

He stands and Raphael stands with him and the two of them head toward the bar, and the table settles into the quieter, easier energy of just the two of us the way it always does when Sophia and I end up alone somewhere.

She tops off her glass from the bottle we haven’t finished yet and looks at me.

I look back.

“I met your mom today,” I say.

Sophia’s expression does something immediate and specific. Not anger. Something more like the resigned, practiced wince of a woman who has been having a version of this reaction for most of her life.

“Oh god.” She sets her glass down. “Not her of all people on your first actual working day. Are you okay?”

I blink at her. “She was an experience for sure. I’m guessing you two aren’t close?”

Sophia leans back in her chair and tips her head. “Where my dad wanted me to learn to fish,” she says, “my mom wanted me to bag a prize-winning husband so I’d never have to.” She says it without bitterness, more like reciting a fact she’s made peace with through sheer repetition. “She had a very specific vision for what my life was supposed to look like. Very specific. Very Evelyn. Very not me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That couldn’t have been easy to grow up in.”

Sophia shrugs, but it’s not a dismissive shrug, it’s the shrug of someone who has done the work of processing something and arrived at a place that isn’t healed exactly, but is livable. “I think that’s actually why you and I clicked so fast,” she says. “Your bio-donors were an absolute shit show and my mom is a trophy. Pretty and shiny and completely cold. And that fucks a girl up good and proper early on, you know? Doesn’t matter how much money is in the picture.”

It doesn’t. I know that more than I know most things.

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I know.”

Sophia reaches across and squeezes my hand once. We don’t need to say more than that about it. It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about her, she knows when to let something be understood without being dissected.

I turn my wine glass in my fingers.

“What about her and your dad?” I ask. “How did that— I mean. I don’t need to know, it’s not my business⁠—”

Sophia arches a brow. Very slowly. With the precision of a woman who has clocked something and is deciding whether to let it pass.

“Why do you want to know about my parents?”

I pull my hand back from the table. “You’re right, it’s not my business. Forget I asked.”

She stares at me for exactly three seconds.

Then she laughs, short and bright, and waves a hand. “Relax. It’s fine, I’m not precious about it.” She reaches for her wine. “The short version is that my dad tried. He genuinely tried for years. But my mom was the emotional equivalent of a gold bar. Beautiful, valuable, completely cold, and absolutely impossible to get warm.” She pauses. “I love her. She’s my mom. But I don’t like her very much and I think she’d tell you the same about me if she was being honest, which she never is, so.”

I nod slowly.

“I had a rough few years after the divorce,” Sophia continues. “It was messy in the way divorces are messy when there’s money and a board seat involved. But I think they’re genuinely better now than they ever were married. Business first, business always, take the marriage completely out of it.” She tilts her head. “My dad’s happier. I think he’s been happier since we moved to that, actually. Hell, I know I’m happier. Especially after you and I became friends.”

Something warm moves through my chest at that. I look at her across the table, this woman who packed my bags and dragged me across an ocean and gave me a reason to stop sitting in a guest room feeling sorry for myself, and I feel the particular gratitude that doesn’t have a clean way to be said out loud.

“Me too,” I tell her.

She grins. Then she leans forward on her elbows and narrows her eyes.

“So.”