Reborn To Repent

Sophie Marchetti

Chapter Seven: Sophie Marchetti

He knew forty things about her that she hadn't told him yet, and that turned out to be the problem.

Not facts, exactly — not her social security number or anything so crude. Preferences. The band she'd claim not to like anymore in five years and secretly still listen to alone. The fact that she hated when men ordered for her, and the fact that she'd once, in his old life, mentioned almost in passing that her father used to do exactly that and she'd never forgiven the habit in anyone since. He knew she ran the East River path on Sunday mornings, early, before it got crowded. He knew the name of the dog she'd get eventually, a rescue mutt she'd call Radar, and cry over harder than she cried over most people when it died at fourteen.

He knew, in other words, exactly how to become the man she'd have wanted, if he'd let himself use any of it.

It started, that October, with a coincidence that wasn't one. Marcus had learned her Sunday running route from a version of her that no longer technically existed, and he told himself, lacing up shoes he hadn't worn in three decades in a body that didn't yet know how to run properly, that he was just going for a run. The East River path was a public place. There was nothing wrong with being on it.

She was there. Of course she was there. He'd made sure of it, which was the part he didn't want to look at directly.

"Chen," she said, slowing, not stopping, so he had to fall into step or let her go. "Didn't take you for a runner."

"New thing," he said, which was true in a way she couldn't understand.

They ran together without deciding to, which became a pattern without either of them naming it a pattern, three Sundays, then most Sundays, through November into a December cold enough that she started wearing a hat that made her look, absurdly, about fourteen years old, and Marcus found himself laughing at things that weren't especially funny just to keep her talking.

He didn't do it on purpose, the small manipulations — that was what he told himself, and it wasn't entirely a lie. But he caught himself, twice, steering a conversation toward a book he knew she loved without ever having been told she loved it, watching her face open up with the particular delight of being seen, and feeling something curdle in his own chest each time, because he hadn't seen her. He'd looked her up in a version of his memory that no one in this life had any right to be read from.

The ledger, that month, filled in a little more. Still nothing legible. But there was a new density to the second line, like ink pooling instead of drying.

He asked the Ledger Keeper about it, once, out loud, alone in the apartment — he wasn't sure the voice could hear him when it wasn't already in the room, but he asked anyway. "Does it count against me. Knowing things about her before she's told me."

Nothing answered. It didn't always. He'd learned that much — the voice came when it wanted to and stayed silent, pointedly, when a question was too close to something Marcus was supposed to work out for himself.

He worked it out for himself, eventually, on a Sunday in January when the river had a skin of ice at the edges and Sophie stopped running, out of breath, and said, apropos of nothing, "You're a strange guy, Chen. You know things. Not facts — like, you'll say something and it's exactly the right thing, every time, and it's never generic. It's specific to me. It's a little unsettling, actually."

He stood there in the cold with his own pulse loud in his ears, and understood, all at once and with total clarity, that he had a choice sitting directly in front of him disguised as a compliment. He could deflect. He could charm his way past it, the way he'd charmed his way past every uncomfortable question anyone had ever asked him for thirty years, and she'd let it go, because she liked him, because the version of intimacy he was offering her felt, from the outside, exactly like the real thing.

"I used to know someone a lot like you," he said instead. "A long time ago. I think I've been — " He stopped. Started again. "I think I've been using what I remember about her to get you to like me. And I don't think that's fair to you. I don't think it's actually me you're getting to know, when I do that."

She was quiet for long enough that he thought he'd ended something before it started.

"That's either the strangest thing anyone's ever said to me," she said finally, "or the most honest. I can't tell which."

"Both, probably."

"Was she — " Sophie didn't finish the question, and he was grateful, because he didn't have an answer that wouldn't require explaining a ledger and a voice with no body and a car leaving a guardrail at eighty-one miles an hour.

"She mattered to me," he said. "I didn't do right by her. I don't want to make the same mistake twice, and I think I've already started."

Sophie looked at him for a long moment, her breath still fogging, hands on her hips, the particular unimpressed patience of a woman deciding whether a man was worth the trouble of taking seriously. "Okay," she said eventually. "So don't. Tell me things and let me tell you whether they're true. That's — that's just how it works, Chen. You don't get to already know me. Nobody gets that. You have to actually ask."

It was such a plain thing to say, and it rearranged something in him anyway, standing on a frozen path in January in a body he'd been given a second chance to live in, being told, by a version of Sophie Marchetti who had never once been failed by him yet, the exact terms on which he was allowed to try.

"Okay," he said. "Then — what's your favorite book. Actually."

She laughed, surprised, like the question had cost him something to ask honestly, which it had. "That's better," she said. "Walk with me. I'll tell you. But you don't get to nod like you already knew."

He didn't. He listened instead, badly at first, catching himself twice reaching for what he remembered before making himself set it down, and by the time they reached the bridge and turned back, he'd learned three things about her that were true and new and entirely, finally, earned.

That night, the ledger had a third line starting beneath the second, and for the first time since it appeared, Marcus thought he could almost make out a single word forming in it, faint, before it faded back into the pressure of something not yet written.

He thought the word might have been honest. He wasn't sure. He decided, lying there, that it didn't matter whether he was sure. It mattered whether he kept doing the thing that made the word appear at all.