Chapter 208 SOPHIA'S HARDER REQUEST

Chapter 208 SOPHIA'S HARDER REQUEST
POV: Sophia

"Sit down, Elena," I said, and waited until she'd settled into the chair beside my bed, because what I needed to tell her wasn't something that should be said to someone standing.

"You're scaring me," she said.

"Good. Fear is appropriate here. I've had months to get used to it, and I still haven't managed it gracefully."

I hadn't told anyone the full truth, not David, not Brittany, not even my own doctor beyond the clinical facts he already had in his charts. There was a difference between what the tests measured and what I could feel happening inside my own body, a difference I'd learned to recognize decades ago and had never once been wrong about. I could feel myself slowing. Not dramatically. Just steadily, the way a clock winds down when nobody remembers to reset it, the specific quiet knowledge a person develops about their own ending when they've lived long enough to recognize its early signs.

"How long have you known?" Elena asked.

"Known for certain? A few weeks. Suspected? Longer than I want to admit."

"And you haven't told David.

"I'll tell David when there's something useful to tell him. Right now there's only worry, and he's had enough of that this year to last several lifetimes."

Elena's jaw tightened, the specific expression she wore when she disagreed with someone but had decided the argument wasn't hers to win. "That's not your decision to make alone, Sophia."

"It's exactly my decision to make alone. I've made harder ones with less certainty." I reached for the water glass on my nightstand, more to give my hands something to do than because I was thirsty. "But I didn't ask you here to argue about disclosure. I asked you here because I need your help with something before it's too late to plan it properly."

"A funeral," Elena said flatly, the word landing hard between us.

"No. Not a funeral. I have people for that, and frankly none of you need my input on the guest list." I allowed myself a small, tired smile. "This is something better. A final gift. Something I want to leave behind for the twins that no document or trust fund could ever replicate."

Elena leaned forward, listening with the careful attention she'd given every difficult thing this family had asked of her across thirty years, the same attention that had once kept a secret room sealed for three decades because a dying woman asked her to.

"What kind of gift?"

I nodded toward the studio, though we were nowhere near it, the gesture more habit than direction. "You've seen the mood board. Clara's original sketches, the ones that survived the fire because she hid them well enough. There's one design near the bottom corner that's dated the same year as the Phoenix Line name itself. The very first sketch. The one that started all of it."

"I've seen it."

"She never got the chance to build it. She drew it, and three days later she was dead, and the sketch has been sitting on that board for thirty years as nothing but a drawing. A beautiful, unfinished idea."

Understanding moved slowly across Elena's face. "You want to finish it."

"I want to finish it," I confirmed. "A design. The very first one. I want to build it, physically, before I go. The garment Clara imagined but never lived to make."

"Sophia, your hands." Elena's eyes dropped briefly to my fingers, thinner now, the tremor I'd been hiding from everyone except her becoming harder to disguise by the week. "Fine detailed sewing work, at your age, with your condition. Do you understand what that would cost you?"

"I understand exactly what it would cost me. That's precisely why I'm asking for help instead of attempting it alone."

"You want me to help you sew."

"I want you to help me finish something that's been waiting thirty years to be finished," I said. "You knew Clara. You loved her, in your own careful way, the same way you've loved every difficult, wonderful woman this family has produced since. I can think of no one better to help me put the last stitches into her final unfinished idea."

Elena was quiet for a long moment, and I watched her turn it over, weighing what it would ask of her against what it would mean if she refused.

"When would we do this?" she finally asked. "You're barely strong enough to sit up for an hour at a time some days."

"An hour at a time is exactly how we'll do it. Slowly. Carefully. Whatever time I have left, I intend to spend some of it with a needle in my hand instead of only in this bed."

"And if you don't finish it in time?"

"Then you'll finish it for me," I said simply. "You know the design well enough by now. You've stared at that mood board as long as any of us."

Elena's eyes were wet, though her voice stayed steady, the way it always did even when everything underneath it wasn't. "You're asking a lot of an old woman with tired hands, Sophia."

"I'm asking a lot of exactly the right old woman, then. There's no one else alive who would understand why this matters the way you do."

"I know."

"You're asking me to keep a secret from Brittany. Again. After everything this family has already survived because of secrets kept too long."

"This is a different kind of secret," I said gently. "Not one built to protect someone from danger. One built to protect a surprise until it's finished, and only for a matter of weeks, not decades. There's a difference, Elena, and I think you know it better than anyone alive."

"Where would we even work?" Elena asked. "The studio's watched constantly. Brittany's in there most mornings, Daisy in the afternoons, Leo running his sweeps whenever he feels like it. There's no hour that room is empty."

"Not the studio," I said. "The room below the east foundation. Clara's hidden room, where the original case sat sealed for thirty years. Nobody goes down there anymore. It's private, and it's fitting, don't you think, to build her last piece in the same room where she hid her first proof of everything that was stolen from her."

"That room has no proper light. No machines."

"Then we bring a lamp, and we do it by hand. Clara built her entire early career by hand, Elena, before machines ever mattered to her work. I think finishing her last piece the same way honors that better than any modern shortcut would."

Elena studied me for a long moment, and I could see her running through every objection her practical mind could produce, testing each one against the plain fact that I had already decided, and that she had never once, in thirty years, managed to talk me out of anything once my mind was made up.

"You're not strong enough to walk down those stairs some mornings," she said finally, softer now, less an argument and more a genuine worry.

"Then you'll help me down them. Slowly. However long it takes."

"And if David finds out we've been sneaking off to a hidden room together for weeks."

"David will forgive us both the moment he understands why," I said. "He's spent this whole year learning that some secrets are kept to protect people, not to control them. I think, by now, he can tell the difference."

She sat with that for a moment longer, and then, slowly, she nodded.

"I want to finish something Clara started and never got the chance to complete," I told her, my voice steadier than I felt. "A design. The very first sketch on that mood board, the one dated the same year as the Phoenix Line name. I want to build it, physically, before I go, the garment Clara imagined but never lived to make." I looked at her. "I need your help keeping this from Brittany until it's finished. It needs to be a surprise. It might be the last thing I ever give her."