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Sophie ate a quarter of her dinner in silence before setting it aside and doing up the dishes, cleaning the kitchen until it gleamed. Then she tidied up the rest of the small two-bedroom she had lived in for her whole life, a family heirloom of sorts.
She cleaned until there was nothing left to clean, not a speck of dust left on the mismatched frames or the secondhand furniture or the tired floors that had never been hers to begin with, all of it passed down from her parents and her mother's parents before them, everything a hand me down except for two pictures Sophie claimed as her own, one from the wedding day of her best friends and the other of the groom just a few years later, donning not a wedding suit but a military uniform. He was a boy of only nineteen in the photo, but already a father of three…four, if you stopped to count the seed sowed the very same morning he left them all behind at New Street Station.
Sophie figured John had met the new baby by now, little Robbie Shelby who was more like the father he had yet to know than any of the other children before him had been, breaking and healing all of their hearts for the last three and a half years with the smiles and gestures they assumed they'd be going without while their proper owner was off in France.
The boy inhabited the space between pain in the arse and little charmer as if navigating a sailboat on calm waters, with the sweetest grin and the silliest comments and getting up to casual mischief integral parts of the boy’s typical way, full of words that had no business coming out of a three-and-a-half-year-old’s mouth and actions that had no business coming to fruition at his innocent little hands and his sweet, gentle way.
It was the thought of Robbie after her second over-poured whiskey that had Sophie slipping into her coat and shoes. Either John would have the kids put to bed and she’d find him alone, quiet. Or the devils would still be up, driving their father mad with their demands for more attention, more stories, more dinner, more sweets.
More, more, more.
John and Martha’s kids hadn’t always seemed hungry from the start, but they had been that way since Martha had gone from them. But with their father gone for so long before their mother’s passing, they just always seemed starved for something these days, anything—the food, the touch, a loving word or a stern one, the answers to a million and two questions.
Sophie imagined those babies had passed John’s first day back gorging themselves on their father’s mere presence, filling themselves to the brim with his laughs, drinking up the blue shine in his eyes, hanging off his every word and limb, stealing away the little insignificant moments in the off chance they’d need to one day make a meal of the meager memories they’d been fed.
It wouldn’t be the first time John and Martha’s babies had subsisted off nothing more than distant memories of John Shelby. Sophie knew that life too, though her memories of John and Martha were far from dim, polished by her mind to shine and shimmer just like the trinkets she’d just spent the evening rubbing a tired cloth over, willing the attention to detail to quiet the particulars running about wild in her mind.
Sophie focused on her steps on the walk over, willing herself to focus on the cool of the wind through her jacket, willing herself to empty her mind of the details. Sophie wasn’t certain of what she’d find in John Shelby after these four years and when emptying her mind failed, she set herself to the task of avoiding expectations, of breaking up any of the pictures that formed in her mind’s eye, unimagining his smile, disassembling his eyes, and shattering the imagined sound of his laugh, but as she stood on Watery Lane, shivering in the damp night’s air, she couldn’t stop herself from picturing him coming to answer her calling.
It felt odd to Sophie for her to be knocking on the door she’d become accustomed to passing through as if it was her own, arriving without notice and towing whichever child was wailing or meddling or in some sort of immediate danger up into her arms as she came through, an act she’d engaged in for months out of some unspoken obligation she felt to John and Martha, to the babies who didn’t ask to be born on the cusp of war, wailing for their father for four long years while everyone thought they were just after a bit of milk or food or kiss and a cuddle to heal an injury away.
And that was all before they’d lost Martha.
A little over four months had passed and the loss of her still felt fresh. Sophie thought maybe because it was, in a way, because they’d all been anticipating the boys’ return, anticipating the fresh wave of pain that would come from another person learning the new way of things, from coming back to a house that felt empty even though it was filled with kids, from the sense of camaraderie that had swiftly left the home, the lost sense of partnership that had once come from a shared glance fraught with laughter when the kids were getting up to something that warranted a snicker, but wasn’t to be encouraged, the shared frustration when all four of them were sick, a shared drink after they all went down, when the exhaustion finally distributed through the limbs and you couldn’t remember what had passed during the three or so hours after dinner.
Those things had all continued to feel fresh to Sophie every single day since Martha had gone. She had thought it would subside, thought that she’d stop looking over her shoulder or imagining telling Martha whatever story about her child when she returned from this outing or that, but those urges, the deep-seated need… it didn’t wane with time, but it was more painful in the start.
That was really what finally pulled Sophie from her kitchen chair, the thought of John alone once the babies went down, alone in the house he’d dreamt of for four years, fantasized about while he tried to sleep in the mud and the dust. At least that’s what Sophie imagined he’d been dreaming about in France—his little house on Watery Lane, filled with his wife and his babies, so loud and chaotic and lovely. They wore those words like a badge of honor, even their sweet, quiet Martha who had barely spoken when they first knew her.
Sophie started when the door creaked open and stepped back onto the cobblestone, nearly tripping over her own feet.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Sophie hadn’t allowed herself to imagine what words would be the first exchanged between them, and the ones she heard stumped her, confused her enough that John’s rough voice could’ve been speaking French and she’d not have known any better how to respond.
His voice, the first part of him she took in, even before she pulled her eyes up from the wet cobblestones to observe his face, was just as she remembered even if it had a little edge to it, and that had her mind crafting the types of responses they’d once been prone to, the cheeky comments that earned reciprocal grins and friendly shoves in the arm, laughter hidden behind hands or an impromptu cough to cover it all.
There was no grin on his lips though and no laughter either as she dragged her eyes from his face, running her gaze over the body he’d leaned against the door frame, focusing on his clothes, just a simple undershirt with sleeves pushed up to his forearm, an old pair of pants that hung a bit loose now, things he’d probably dug out of the bottom of his drawers.
“They’ve been asking after you all afternoon.”
Sophie met his eyes then and found them tired and red, fatigued from more than just being with a bunch of rowdy kids all day. John seemed tired in a way the kids couldn’t touch, and Sophie had a feeling their presence, their shouting and scrambling and squealing had made him look a bit better, a bit more alive, even though she couldn’t make herself imagine him looking worse.
“I only asked after you once,” he continued in her silence, backing through the door. “Pol said, ‘Let the girl have a day off. She’s been with those kids every—’ ”
“I wanted to give you time with your family, John. I—” Sophie followed him, stepping in off the lane and securing the door behind her, dealing with the lock that always caught with a certain ease as John watched her, a bit of sickness settling in his stomach. It was why he rarely locked it. He could never get it on the first try and somewhere along the line, he'd just decided it wasn’t worth his trouble.
John cleared his throat. “So, you’ve really been with them every day?”
Sophie caught his gaze as he turned back to her, his eyes sweeping over the simple green dress she’d exposed by taking off her coat before he settled back on her face, her cheeks warmed by the journey his eyes had just made.
She shrugged. “Someone needed to be.”
John nodded, reaching behind him to grab the glass of whiskey he’d set aside to answer the door.
She’d spent the last four years accumulating questions and comments for him, four years of things she knew she’d one day like to ask or say, but she couldn’t bring herself to voice a single one of them, all of it seeming a bit disingenuous considering, so Sophie focused instead on picking up the toys discarded across the room, settling them in their proper place before she noticed John was watching her, taking slow sips from his overpoured glass as his eyes followed her.
“We ate at number six,” he said as her gaze drifted to the kitchen door.
She already knew that though, was well acquainted with the schedule of the day for the Shelby family, the 11:17 into New Street, the family lunch planned immediately after, the lunch which she supposed had spanned until dinner, drinks maybe, screaming kids covering any of the awkward silences.
Babies always did that.
“John, I…”
John turned from Sophie as the creaking stairs sounded and Sophie wasn’t sure if she’d rather curse or thank the baby rubbing his eyes as he made his way down, heading straight for her skirts, hiding there against her side as John watched the two of them.
“It’s past bedtime, mate. You should be asleep.”
Sophie smoothed back the sweaty hair from Robbie’s face, both of them eyeing John as he took another sip of the whiskey.
“Your dad’s right, Robbie,” Sophie said, trying to take his hand and lead him towards the stairs, but the boy reached his arms up instead.
Sophie sighed and hoisted him up to her hip, his head immediately falling to her shoulder as she settled him in her arms.
“Can you read me a story?”
“How many stories have you already had?” she asked.
“Just one,” he said. “Aunt Polly told us just one because you spoiled us with too many. Can you read me a story even though it’s your day off?”
Sophie snorted. “My day off?”
“Aunt Polly told ‘em it was your day off.”
Sophie glanced at the clock. It was seventeen minutes past midnight.
“Good thing for you it’s tomorrow,” she said. “Go find daddy’s book.”
Sophie let the boy down and watched him amble across the room, watched as he tugged the heavy book off the shelf, stealing a few glances towards John as he settled on the far corner of the couch with his glass still in hand.
Sophie sat half a cushion away from him, grateful when Robbie climbed up into the space between them, settling the open book there in his lap, tilting the pages toward Sophie.
“Maybe daddy will read with us if we ask nicely, eh Robbie?”
“Sissy says you do better voices than Auntie Sophie.” Robbie spoke the words into the space in front of him, his eyes on the book rather than his father.
“Hey, there—” Sophie tickled his side, the small squeal bringing a tired smile to John’s face. “—My voices are just fine, mister!”
“Yeah, well, Uncle Tommy does ‘em better than any of us, eh Soph?”
Thomas Shelby doing the voices was something Sophie hadn’t thought of in some time, something she hadn’t heard since they were kids themselves, and she found herself longing for it a bit, the tenor of Tommy acting as the villain or the hero or Aunt Polly. It brought a gentle smile to her face, a wistful sort of relaxation falling over her, a feeling she found lacking in John as he chewed his lip for a moment.
“I’ll concede your daddy that,” Sophie finally offered. “Your Uncle Tommy does it best.”
Robbie made a face, raising his eyebrows as he glanced up at Sophie. “Really?”
The boy couldn’t imagine the man who’d sat at the table all day doing little more than smoke his cigarettes and answer questions in curt monosyllables doing the voices.
“Put us all to shame when we were little like you.”
“You weren’t ever little like me!” Robbie accused, poking her shoulder.
Sophie poked him back, tickling him a bit as he started to giggle. “Everyone starts out little like—”
John cleared his throat. “Alright you two, it’s late. What are we reading?”
“A good one. I just have to find it,” Robbie mumbled.
The boy flicked through the pages, slow and deliberate as he peered at the titles he couldn’t read, the symbols and pictures matched in his head with the tales they accompanied. John rubbed his eyes and settled his head against his fist, his gaze directed across the room while Robbie continued with his search for several minutes.
With only the sound of pages turning and Robbie mumbling to himself, Sophie shifted, settling her legs beneath her and stretching her arm across the back of the couch, her fingertips barely grazing John’s shoulder. It startled him and he met her eye for a moment before reaching for the book in Robbie’s hands. John pulled it into his lap and started reading off the open page, the only complaint from Robbie a look of shock when the boy turned to Sophie, his discontent quelled by her smile and the magic that was his father reading him a story for the first time.
As John read on, Robbie leaned back against Sophie, his eyes struggling to stay open as the words lulled him to sleep. John gave it a page and a half extra after the boy's breathing deepened before he shut the book and set it on the coffee table.
Sophie moved to shift the boy who’d curled into her during John’s performance, but John reached down, his hand sliding against Sophie’s side as he pulled Robbie up and away from her, settling the boy against his chest, the baby’s eyes fluttering open at John’s gentle repositioning.
“Sophie,” he mumbled, reaching his little hand down toward her though he stayed resting against his father’s chest.
John held a hand down and tugged her up, marching up the stairs first, his head shaking as his sleepy son extended his hand down over his shoulder, reaching out with his small fingertips to hold Sophie’s hand.
“Say goodnight to Aunt Sophie,” John said just outside the door to the bedroom where he and Joey slept, the room just across from the girls.
Robbie mumbled something incoherent and Sophie pressed a kiss to his forehead before his father carried him into the room, tucking him back under the covers, whispering something Sophie couldn’t hear, a short set of words that elicited a giggle from the boy and a chuckle from John as he shushed him and pulled up the covers.
“They missed you," Sophie offered as John shut the door to the boy's room and stepped across the hall to look in on his daughters.
“I don’t know. That one seemed more excited to see you than he was to see me.”
Sophie let out a soft scoff as she headed to the stairs, John just behind her as she went.
“Robbie’s a sweet boy…and a right pain,” she offered, turning up the stairs as she reached the bottom, a small smirk gracing her face as she delivered the teasing offense, “much like his father.”
“Well, he looks like her.”
Sophie, stilled, a hand going to the back of the sofa for stability, her heart a touch heavier at the mere mention of the woman who should’ve been there helping John tuck the baby back into bed. Her eyes squeezed shut for a moment though it didn’t stop her from seeing in her mind exactly what John had meant.
Robbie had her eyes, not the color, but the set of them, and a dimple just to the right side of his smile. There was something about the nose, too, though Sophie hadn’t yet figured out exactly what, but somehow it was Martha’s face there in the boy, even if it was John’s mouth and mannerisms and mind.
“Sarah, too,” he said, pouring whiskey into two glasses and settling them both on the coffee table as he sat back onto the couch. “I remember when she was born thinking she wasn’t mine. The kid didn’t look a thing like me. That’s why she was so insistent we name her after my mother.”
Sophie lowered herself onto the cushion beside him. “Well, I’ve never had a doubt. Those kids are all a bit of you.”
“And a bit of her,” John said.
“Yeah, well, that’s usually how it works.”
John finished his drink, setting it aside, his gaze fixed off across the room again though he could’ve been someplace else, a different house, a different country, a different time.
His hand was shoved in his pocket, and Sophie watched as he fiddled with something.
“How long was she sick? Was she—”
“John,” Sophie said, his name nothing more than a plea.
It was starting to grate on her, the way John wouldn’t say his wife’s name, the way 'Martha' had yet to come from their lips, but Sophie could feel the woman there, filling the room, filling the space between them, filling the hurt, but neither one of them had even said her name.
“How long?” he ground out, pulling his hand from his pocket and leaning forward to settle his elbows on his knees, a glint of gold finding the light as he fumbled with a ring.
Martha's ring.
Sophie put her hand on his shoulder, pulling back when he turned to her, repeating his question.
“How long?”
Sophie swallowed, her eyes shifting to his hand, to the ring before she could bring herself to deliver an answer.
“I know you were here every day, then, too. How—”
“A few...three months,” she said, swallowing the lump in her throat. “She was sick for three months...or just about.”
John nodded. “Seemed like it came on sudden.”
That’s what the letter had said, the one delivering the message of her passing. It had been the first that had said anything about her being sick, first and last.
“She didn’t want you to…”
“And what about you? You didn’t write me the whole time I was away.”
It seemed silly now, the argument that Sophie had had in her mind to explain away four long years of silence, the one that said it wasn’t her place to be writing to him. Sophie had decided that it was something reserved for family, for Martha and the kids, for Polly and Ada and Finn, but there was a lot of things Sophie had done that had seemed reserved for family, a lot of business and caretaking that traditionally wouldn’t have been done by anyone other than a Shelby, and her not writing suddenly felt selfish, because her eyes had run over the letters John sent home. She’d memorized the stories scrawled out on the backs of his letters just as well as the children had, and she hadn’t even let him know his wife was sick.
She hadn’t written to him after either, hadn’t taken up Martha’s penning him lengthy tales of what the kids got up to on Watery Lane even though she knew whatever Polly and Ada were sending him wouldn’t be good enough because while John sent the kids tales from some fictional world he’d devised in his head, Martha had for four years sent him masterpieces of their domestic life, her tales of Sarah, Joey, Katie, and Robbie Shelby somehow coming across as epic fantasies, entertaining and descriptive, and so well done that the kids John came home to didn’t feel so much like little strangers to him.
And their best friend Sophie was weaved in there too. Martha had always been sure to include something about her, some silly story about something she’d gotten up to with the kids or some tit for tat she’d gotten into with Polly, mischief she got up to with Ada or Finn. There was always something, but Sophie hadn’t had it in her to take it on, not after being quiet for so long.
She let out a breath, blinking away the wetness in her eyes.
“I should have,” she said, her voice dwindling to a low murmur, the words barely coming out at all, “especially after Martha, but…”
Sophie stopped herself, so easily paused in her explanation because she'd been hoping for him to interrupt so she wouldn’t have to continue, so her voice wouldn’t break.
She thought the sound was nothing more than John clearing his throat, preparing himself to speak, but then his shoulders started shaking as he leaned forward, his silent sobs pressed into his fists as the ring fell to the floor, and Sophie sat frozen beside him, allowing his pain to wash over her, the pain she brought on just by saying Martha’s name, something they’d been dancing around since she came through the door, and just like in not writing him, Sophie realized she had been standing just outside, holding him at a distance, acting like this moment wasn’t hers to intrude on, like John wasn’t hers to comfort, just like he hadn’t been hers to write to, just the same as the way she’d barely allowed herself to cry over Martha’s death, letting those who were supposed to grieve have it even though John and Martha Shelby were the closest thing she had to family.
Sophie reached out a hand, tentative, slow, and had barely settled it on John's shoulder when he shrugged it off. “You shouldn’t have kept it from me, either one of you.”
“John, I—”
“No,” John said, his voice nearly masked by the sound of the glass shattering as he picked it up and tossed it across the room. He turned to Sophie, showing his reddened face and tear-stained cheeks.
Sophie stood up only for John to catch her wrist, keeping her still. “You should’ve known better. You should’ve fucking told me the truth. You should’ve—”
Sophie shook her head and held herself back from prying at his grasp, hoping her words would do the trick and he'd let her go. “John, I think I should—”
“Don’t go.” John tugged her to him, his head suddenly set against her stomach, his arms tight around her back as he hugged her to him.
Sophie stood there with her hands raised up in the air, unsteady on her heels, held up on her feet only by John’s crushing arms, surprised by the sudden shift in the room. As she steadied herself, Sophie was near-certain that she would break, both from the sound of John's painful wailing and the tightness of his arms wrapped around her.
Sophie took a settling breath as she lowered her arms around him, rubbing her palms first over his tensed arms before allowing her fingertips to find his hair, cradling the back of his head with one hand as her other hand found moved to his shoulder and back as she shushed him, soothing just as she'd done with his babies and his wife while he was away, easing the pain, drawing out the hurt, wishing wholly for them to find a bit of peace.
“They all leave, Soph.”
Sophie swallowed at John’s words, willing her mind to stop itself from running through the list, unable to stop once it got going.
Sophie’s mother.
Sophie’s father.
Her older sister.
John’s mother.
Tommy’s Greta.
And now their Martha.
It took everything in Sophie to not agree with him, to not slip down into the same pit of hurt and despair and hopelessness that came at accepting the truth of his words, to acknowledge that so many had left them behind, left them alone.
Sophie held him to her still, clinging to him even as his grip slackened and the fight that had him gripping her fell away, his sobs still echoing in the quiet as she whispered to him.
“I won’t leave you, John. I'll stay.”
For the night, the week, for the rest of their lives. Sophie knew even as she'd said it, that's what she meant. She'd be there for John in whatever way he needed, same as always.