Chapter 148 Last Week of School

Chapter 148 Last Week of School
The last week of school always ran fast and slow at once, fast in the sense that the days blurred together into packing boxes and cleared bulletin boards, slow in the sense that every small ritual seemed to want extra time this year, as though the class understood without being told that this particular ending mattered more than the ordinary ones.

Kieran brought her a card on the final Wednesday, folded carefully, KNIGHT WILLIAM drawn on the front in a style that had clearly improved since the trilogy's dedication page. Inside, in handwriting still working its way toward neatness: Thank you for saying the ending was the best part. I still think about that.

He'd grown taller over the year, Sofia noticed, the way children did without seeming to notice it themselves, still carrying the same careful seriousness he'd brought to every reading session with Tyler, still the boy who'd once organized a class vote with full parliamentary formality to bring a suspended man back to their classroom.

“I’ll think about it too,” Sofia told him, and she meant it in a way that extended beyond the classroom, beyond anything she could explain to a seven-year-old without making him uncomfortable. She had spent two years learning that endings could sometimes be the best part of something, that closing a difficult chapter properly could be its own kind of victory rather than a loss dressed up to seem bearable.

Valentina found her at her desk after the last bell, the room already half stripped of its year's accumulation. "You look like you're thinking about something bigger than bulletin boards."

"I am." Sofia glanced at the door, checked the hallway was empty, and let herself say it out loud for the first time outside her own apartment. "Tyler and I are trying for a baby."

Valentina's whole face opened up, delighted, immediately. "Sofia."

"I know." She felt herself smiling in the same helpless, unguarded way she had on the floor of the yellow room. "We painted the spare room already. Emma doesn't know the actual plan yet, just that it's not going to be a study."

"When do you tell her?"

"Soon. I keep saying soon and meaning it a little more each time." Sofia straightened a stack of Kieran's finished notebooks, buying herself a second before continuing. "There's no version of me from two years ago who could have said any of this out loud without needing to check every exit in the room first. I checked the hallway just now, out of habit, and then I noticed myself doing it and let it go. Small thing. Felt large, though, in the moment."

"That's real progress. The noticing part especially."

"Rebecca used to say the same thing. That the noticing is where the actual change lives, not the moment everything feels resolved." Sofia glanced toward the windowsill, where Kieran's crayon installation still sat exactly as it had for two years, untouched by the general clearing-out happening everywhere else in the room. She'd never moved it, not once, some unspoken agreement between her and the boy who'd made it that a thing could belong to a place and stay there. "I used to think I'd know I was healed when nothing scared me anymore. Now I think it's more that the fear stops being the loudest thing in the room. It's still there sometimes. It's just not driving anymore."

Valentina squeezed her shoulder on the way out, leaving her alone in the classroom for the last few minutes of the school year, sunlight coming through the windows at the angle it always did in late June, warm across the empty desks. Sofia sat a while longer than she needed to, the way she'd started doing more often lately, letting herself feel things fully instead of hurrying past them toward the next task.

Tyler picked her up that evening, Emma already buckled in the back seat with a folder of the year's best drawings clutched to her chest like contraband she'd smuggled out under armed guard.

"How was the last day?" he asked.

“Good. Full.” She fastened her seatbelt and watched the school recede in the side mirror as they pulled away, a whole year quietly folding into the past, as years tended to do when you were not paying close enough attention to the exact moment they ended.
Twenty-three children who had arrived in September barely able to write their names had left able to argue about knights, villages, and endings with genuine conviction.
“I told Valentina about us. About trying.”

"How'd that feel?"

"Easier than I expected. Getting easier every time, actually. I think that's the whole trick of saying a true thing out loud. It gets lighter each time you carry it somewhere new."

Tyler reached over and found her hand at the first red light, same as always now, a habit so worn into their evenings it barely registered as a choice anymore, just the shape their hands made together whenever the car slowed. Behind them, Emma narrated something about her drawings to no one in particular, happy and unbothered, the whole summer opening up ahead of her the way it did every June, wide and unhurried and full of stables and parliament sessions and whatever else the next few months decided to hold.

Sofia watched the city slide past the window and let herself think, just for a moment, about the yellow room waiting at home, patient, ready, holding space for something none of them could see yet but all of them, in their own quiet ways, had already started to make room for.

Somewhere ahead of them, past the summer, past whatever the hockey season still had left to decide, was a plane ticket dated the fourteenth of June and a city on the other side of an ocean that had already once taught them how much a year could change a person. Sofia found she wasn't afraid of finding out what it would teach them the second time. She had spent two years learning that the future, unlike the past, was not something that happened to her. It was something she got to help build, one small honest sentence at a time, and she intended to keep building it exactly that way, no matter how many more Junes it eventually took.