Page 95 of Steadfast
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“You just missed Sophie,” my father said as I entered the garage the next day after going out to buy sandwiches.
Damn it, my heart said even as my asshole brain said,Good thing. “What did she want?”
“To give you this.” He passed me a sheet of paper folded in two.
I flipped open the note.
Jude—
I found a good use of the money you made off the Porsche parts. I donated it to a great cause, and I really want you to see the results. Meet me at the hospital tomorrow at ten AM in the Neurology Department on the second floor, B-Wing.
—Sophie
“Uh. I guess I have to go somewhere tomorrow morning for a couple hours.”
“Okay.”
I read the letter three more times, looking for clues. Her instructions didn’t leave any room for argument—she just ordered me to show up. That pissed me off for about two seconds, maybe three. Then I spent the next twenty-four hours counting down until I could see Sophie, if only for a few minutes.
The hospital was only a fifteen-minute drive away, but I hadn’t accounted for all the snow we’d been getting. The parking lot’s snow banks were so high that it took me extra time to find a spot. By the time I made it to the Neurology Department I was about five minutes late. Sophie wasn’t in the waiting room.
“Are you Jude?” a woman wearing scrubs asked me.
“Yeah.”
“Please come with me. Sophie has already gone into the auditory testing room. You’re going to watch from here.”
I followed her into a darkened, closet-sized room with a window and two chairs in it. The window was one-way glass, so I could see into an office with a table and chairs and a desk with an unusual computer on it.
There were four people there, but my eyes found Sophie first. She looked ridiculously beautiful in a soft blue sweater and black pants. She bent over a toddler—a little girl who was sitting on her mother’s lap. Sophie seemed to be trying to entertain the child while a technician in a lab coat fit something over her ear. A hearing aid, maybe?
The toddler watched Sophie with a rapt expression as Sophie held out a book—the kind with the cardboard pages that babies can’t destroy very easily. “What’s this?” Sophie asked, opening to a page I couldn’t see.
With one hand, the toddler raised her fingers up in the air and made a bouncing motion.
“Bunny!” said her mother behind her. “Good girl.”
“Okay, we’re all set,” the technician said, leaving the hearing aid on the baby and walking around the desk to take a seat in front of the computer monitor. “I’ll just need a minute to make some adjustments.”
Sophie had told me about her case with the deaf toddler who needed cochlear implants. But she’d never told me how that had turned out. This must be the child?
The baby began to look restless, as if she wouldn’t mind climbing down off her mother’s lap to go explore some of the machinery in the room. She made an impatient whine.
“Almost there, baby girl,” Sophie said.
“Here we go, I’m turning it on,” the woman at the terminal said. “Talk to her, Mom.”
“Can you hear me?” the young woman asked her child. The mother could not have been more than twenty.
The baby didn’t react to her question. She watched Sophie, waiting for her to turn another page in the book.
“Keep talking,” the technician suggested. “I’m going to adjust the volume.”
“Hi, baby,” the mother said as her daughter continued to look the other way. “Can you hear Mama’s voice? Hi, Samantha. How is Samantha today?”
Suddenly, the toddler’s whole body jerked with surprise. Her eyes popped wide and her mouth fell open. She made a breathy little gasp and turned her chin toward her mother.
