Alright, first things first, I would like to state that this little project of mine was born from MY thoughts, and MY personal ideas of the couple and their child after episode 9x24. I love the characters, I love the way the show has written their story and I, also, love the fact that sites like allow us as writers to play with them. Make them our own. Despite how real or how unrealistic the settings and situations may seem. Someone is making an effort to write it, putting some passion into their work and loving what they do. So when I receive reviews such as this:

:This is the most unrealistic piece of crap I've ever read. Firstly Callie
would NEVER EVER leave her daughter not in a million years. Next off Callie
and Erica? Please? Can you not think of anything more original? Like Callie
would go there again after fleeing from what Arizona done then to walk into
the arms of someone who hurt her previous to Arizona.

I assume you are planning on having Sofia turn against Arizona once she finds
out her mother cheated? Some stupid crappy SL like that? Arizona raised her
clearly all these years - Her cheating when Sofia was a baby has nothing to do
with anything at all - at least where Sofia as an adult is concerned.

This is just ridiculous:

Do I get offended? No. The truth is, someone must have felt pretty damn passionate to even bother writing a review in the first place or read up to the second chapter. If you didn't care, you wouldn't review. Am I right? I like to provoke a reaction, I want you to tell me that its 'unrealistic crap', I want you to feel something when you read my work. Now, do I want you to assume what this story is going to be? No. That I may get a little miffed by.

I don't know what the future will bring for this story, but will it be utterly predictable? Probably not. And if it is, then I am truly sorry. But what I am not sorry for is writing this piece of work. I love it.

For those of you who read this and enjoy it, I thank you. I thank you for any support you have to offer whether you write a review, or simply silently enjoy reading it and choose to keep your comments unseen. I respect that.

Thank you to all of you who read, write, and enjoy making this site a true splendor to explore.

Sincerely,

PaintParadise

Chapter 3: Nineteen

In the morning, as the light danced through the windows onto walls and across Sofia's face, she awoke. Her eyes slowly opened and adjusted to see that she wasn't in her apartment. It hadn't been some insanely confusing dream. She pushed the blanket off and rose to sit at the edge of the couch while suppressing a yawn, her arms stretching above her head. Suddenly, she was thinking more clearly and wide awake, all the words her mother had spilled the night previous swam in the pool of her mind. Was she furious? No. Was she curious? Yes. It made some kind of sense even though it remained a huge gray area of her life – A promise to a person was everything. It meant a huge deal. But Callie had made the right decision... She believed.

As she tried to picture a life without her blond mother, finding it difficult to imagine, Sofia lifted herself from the couch. She walked into the kitchen after grabbing her glass from the coffee table, then peered around for the sink. There was no sugar coating any of what had happened, Sofia deduced, but the complete omission of the information was very unexpected. Of all the lessons her mother had taught her while she grew, one always rang well above the rest: Tell the truth and, when you make any promise, follow through. So why was she so conflicted? She didn't know what to think.

-BuzzBuzz- -BuzzBuzz-

Sofia heard her cell phone go off on the coffee table, the gentle vibrations audibly sounding over the hard surface of glass in the living room. Her eyes quickly shot to the time on the stove, 7:40 a.m., it wasn't yet time for her mother to be calling on her break so she turned to walk briskly back into the other room. Nearly clipping the edge of the tv stand with her hip as she passed, still being pretty unused to the new environment, the young woman reached for her phone and answered it without looking at the caller ID on the screen.

"Hey?" She greeted quietly and hurriedly, almost certain by the time she picked up the call it would have gone to voice mail.

"Hey, stranger." A rich, deep female voice filled Sofia's ear, the sound of which forced her eyes to close in relief. She felt the corners of her lips curl into a smile while she absentmindedly slipped a hand into her jeans pocket.

"It's you." She said lightly while angling to return back to the kitchen, planning to refill her empty glass once again.

"It's me. I haven't heard from you in about three days now, so I just wanted to see if you were alive or dead." Sofia heard Zola state as the sink gurgled to life. Had it been days? Had she really been that withdrawn and in her head to realize she'd been forgetting to call? Damn.. She thought. Before having the chance to reply, Sofia heard the floor above her head begin to creak under the weight of the other woman in the house. Her eyes shot to the spot that it seemed to emit from.

"Zoe, I love you for checking up on me, but I have to go. I'll call you back in a few hours. I'm alive, I'm good, just in the middle of something." Sofia said through a small smile to her friend on the line. A brief sigh from Zola met her ear but, at the same time, she could almost see the dark skinned woman offering a nod with it.

"Alright, I'll be waiting. If I don't pick up right away, I'll call you right back. We're busy in the pit today."

The pair their good bye's to one and other then Sofia closed her flip phone with a click. The same hand reached to turn off the water tap as she waited for the older woman to make her appearance. The creaking from above continued for a short while before she could hear the sounds of bare feet against cool hard wood as her mother descended the stairs to the main level. In moments, just after Sofia had leaned back against the counter to rest, Callie walked into the kitchen.

"Good morning." Sofia greeted through a small half smile as she met Callie's gaze. The older woman nodded and offered a similar smile in return.

"Did you sleep fine?" The raven haired chief asked while walking passed her daughter and towards the coffee maker. Sofia watched as Callie busied herself with the task of grabbing a coffee filter and the carton of Folgers out of the freezer.

"I slept alright, you?" Sofia watched as her mother angled her head to peer back at her, just for a moment.

"I slept well." Was the warm reply the younger woman received in return to her question. Sofia gave a small nod of the head then took a sip of her water. When Callie's hands stopped their fussing over the coffee maker, the woman turned to mirror her daughter's position.

"You still want to talk about some things?" Callie asked Sofia, as she folded her arms over her chest casually and leaned against the kitchen counter.

"I just want to know why you couldn't stick around, why you couldn't 'recover', as you put it," Sofia stated honestly. "I want to know everything, I guess." She was truly curious. Whatever happened, happened. There was no other way for it to turn out, perhaps. But still the sinking feeling that more had yet to be said was there, sitting, in the depth of her stomach like an anvil waiting to drop. She watched Callie watching her with large brown eyes filled with some unknown emotion. She couldn't read Callie like she could read her mom.

"Your mom and I gave it our best shot after the amputation. I tried to be gentle with her and give her the space she needed. It didn't work. I tried to reason with her and show her some tough love, urging her to talk to me but she wouldn't. The promise I made meant everything to her, at the time, leaving nothing for me to do to make it right. The rest you're just going to have to talk to your mom about. Someday." Callie explained pointedly. It was clear by the look on her face that she wanted to be able to give more, offer more... However, she may have felt that it wasn't her place to say. Sofia's brow furrowed.

"Did you ever try to see me again?" She then asked as the smell of hot coffee began to filter in through her nostrils, exciting her senses. Callie's expression grew a bit amused.

"I made our friend, Bailey, call me with updates after I changed my number. She called me every week for forty eight months, then the calls started coming ever other week," Her mother said as she turned to grab a few mugs from behind in a cupboard. "Then they grew less and less. I always had you in my thoughts, I was always worried about you, but I knew Arizona was going to be an amazing mother so I had no doubt that you were safe with her."

Sofia pushed off the counter and walked to Callie's fridge to find some milk or cream. She opened the door with her mother's gaze following her every movement. When she bent down to look inside the fridge she was surprised to find that it was nearly barren. A half a brick of cheese, mostly condiments, a few bottles of wine and some old take out cartons stared back at her.

"There should be some coffee cream in the door." She heard her mother say. She was right. Next to three bottles of Tabasco sauce she found the carton of cream and took it from the thin shelf the door provided.

"Don't eat much?" Sofia asked as she pushed the fridge door closed, before stepping to stand beside Callie at the counter with the carton in hand.

"I don't eat here much. I grab a bit of breakfast before work, grab dinner after work. I lead a boring life." The older woman replied while sliding a mug of coffee toward Sofia.

"You realize I'm going to have to take some time off, maybe a weekend coming up, to go to Seattle, right?" There was no use in beating around the bush with Callie. If it wasn't obvious that she wanted to get the matter resolved as quickly as possible, then she'd make the older doctor see.

"Do you think that's wise," Callie questioned while grabbing some sugar cubes from the cupboard above the coffee pot. "Do you realize how insanely pissed your mom is going to be that all of this has come out of the wood work?"

"I don't care if she's angry," Sofia countered bluntly, her head angled to look at the woman standing at her side – Callie too peered over at her with surprise etched into her features. "I love my mom. I love her so much because she is an amazing woman. But she does have faults and flaws just like you or I. I'm neutral. Like the Swiss. If she's mad, she's mad. There's nothing I can do. Though I still deserve to know all the facts. I'd like her to open up to me about this."

"That's going to be hard for your mother to do. If she didn't tell you a single thing about me or about our marriage for all this time, then she's going to have a hard time talking about it now." Callie told Sofia in a clear tone, her gaze bouncing back to the mug of coffee she was stirring.

"Still, I know my mom well enough to know she had her reasons. She'll tell me. I have a feeling she's known it's coming for a while but not like this." Sofia too glanced back down into the creamy swirling liquid held in the black mug set in front of her. Over the passed night and thinking back upon her life Sofia had realized there were many moments where Arizona had almost let everything slip, but stopped herself. She could remember vividly an instance where she, as a child, had found a large box in the back of her mother's closet. Pictures, clothes, miscellaneous items had been taken out of her small hands and placed back in the cardboard box. Her mother's words rang in her ear like a distant memory. These are not toys, honey. These are mommy's private things. If she still had them, it had to have meant something.

"Take as much time as you need, Sof. Work will always be waiting for you when you get back, I'll try to make sure you don't fall behind." Callie's words shook Sofia from her reverie, forcing her to look back into the older woman's eyes. She, for some reason unknown, did trust Calliope. She trusted her to tell her the truth of the matter, to be there for her if she needed it – there was something in the woman's eyes that told her that she was safe in her presence. Maybe from all the time spent guilty and waiting for the sky to fall. Well, they were there then, together, and the sky hadn't crushed them both.

"You know, I had dreams when I was little of this woman who looked like me, holding me, singing to me. I know it was you, I always knew you were out there. But as I got older I thought maybe it had all just been a lie I had been telling myself. Now that I know for sure I wasn't crazy.. I'm relieved," Sofia told her mother while her fingers curled around the handle of her mug. "Either way, whatever my mom says, I still want to know you and I want you to be around. I'm old enough to make that decision for myself."

The pair of women shared a silence together, sipping their coffees and leaning against the counter. There wasn't much more that needed to be said between them at the time. Much more would unfold before them, maybe bringing them closer or pushing them apart, but they had still found one and other. Just because it wasn't the perfect mother/daughter connection that dreams were made of didn't make it any less real. It was real. It was new. It was going to be an adventure and Sofia felt confident that no matter how upset her mom was when she finally confided in her the events of the past few days, she would be understanding. Eventually.

Meanwhile in Seattle, a dark skin doctor leaned into the doctors lounge to flag the attention of her attending.

"Arizona, I got a hold of Sofia this morning. She said she's doing fine, but return her call anyway." Zola told the blond doctor who was feeding the snack machine in the corner of the room with quarters. Arizona tossed a glance and a smile at the doorway.

"Thank you, Zoe. I really appreciate that. She's driving me crazy with all these two second phone calls, maybe I'll get a whole five minutes for a change." The blond woman laughed a bit through her words, yet worry lines still etched themselves at the corner of her eyes. Since her daughter had left for New York the calls grew fewer and fewer. She understood that being a doctor meant dedicating your life to your practice, constantly working to improve your technique and patient skills, though she had hoped they'd at least have had a few more longer conversations before Sofia was swamped. Unless she had found someone.

"No problem, let me know if you need anything else. I got some charting to do, so, we'll catch up later."

"For sure." Arizona replied as she leaned down to grab the bag of potato crisps from where they had dropped. Zoe nodded to no one and took her leave of the blond doctor, leaving Arizona alone to her thoughts. The woman took her bag of chips to a table and sat back down in front of her lap top, researching as always, while she took her lunch break. She dug around in her pocket for her cell phone then speed dialed Sofia before bringing the phone up to her ear; the message left the night previous still playing in the back of her mind. Sofia didn't sound like herself, maybe there was someone new in her life...

TBC...