She couldn't see the road. But Sofia definitely felt that arm. It wrenched her fake Hermès away. She really shouldn't worry, shouldn't care at all that she wasn't going home with it, and yet, she made a U-turn and chased after the wretched thief, her limbs picking up speed, mind wondering if she was ever going to make it to him. She did. Sofia never saw his face, either. It was the way things were. It was the way that she never saw Jim's face that night, even when he was looking straight at her, sitting across the candlelit table across her, the one that didn't feel so candlelit anymore, that she had wrecked to pieces, too hateful to toss it out to the Salvation Army.
Jim had been her first love, her first everything. He was her first rebellion from her parents, her first elopement, and the eventual cause of her father's first heart attack he passed away from a year later. Jim, in that sense, was also the reason why her mother had refused to see her, and Franklin, the younger brother she practically raised, cursed at her. It was the first time any of this was happening to her, and it was all new.
Did she regret it?
Yes.
Sofia regretted that all this hadn't happened sooner.
It was as if they took her for a fool, feeding her lies without shame and stowing the remainder of it under the cupboard where they could come in handy later. There had always been something off about her family. She had noticed it while growing up, the disjoint manner in which she was treated relative to Franklin. It was like she was a hostile invader into the family of three and that any measure of her success was a bad omen. They always had this mix of unease and envy whenever she reported high grades, and once, Franklin had hit her right across the face, claiming that she was mocking him for placing last in his class. Sofia remembered looking at her younger brother's distorted features as if he were a stranger in silence and walking away to her room, her report card in hand. That evening, she had come out to take some water, hungry from missing out on lunch and overhearing a wonderful family conversation that struck her insides. It turned out that her father was her uncle and that this was her inheritance, the usual case of deceitful poor relatives. Sofia was thirteen and far more sensible than the average one, her mind wondering what it was that she should do in this situation.