AN: So I have another little chapter for you here and a couple of notes that I'd like to throw out there. The Sophia in this story is a Sophia all her own. Some of you have read Broken Mirrors, and I don't want you to think that this is going to be exactly the same Sophia, because she's not. She may be similar in some ways, but I envision her to be quite different.

I also wanted to let you know that I've got a lot going on right now in real life so I'll update when I can, but I've been doing the whole "away from the computer" life thing for a couple of days and I'm about to do it for a few more. I just wanted you to know that I didn't disappear, I'm just up to other things. I'll be back when and where I can.

I hope you enjoy the chapter! Let me know what you think!

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"So you still ain't gonna talk ta me? That's just how we gonna do this now?" Daryl asked, coming into the kitchen while Carol was starting dinner.

Carol looked at him. She wasn't even sure where he'd gone. She'd figured he was off sulking somewhere because he seemed to consider himself the most wronged at the moment simply because she wasn't sharing with him her feelings on the information that she'd recently acquired and hadn't even begun to fully digest yet.

"I'm going to talk to you, Daryl," Carol responded, "but right now just isn't the time. I have to get supper going and I just...I don't even know what to say and I don't want this to end up being some kind of discussion with Sophia just in there. I just don't think it's the right time."

"Did you talk ta her?" Daryl asked. "Where's she at?"

"She's in her room," Carol responded with a sigh. "And I talked to her, but I don't know what to say to her either. You told her the situation, the one that I can't even...you told her and I don't know how much is too much for her. I just thought she might want to rest. I thought she might want to unpack and eat dinner. She might want to think about things and settle in."

Carol continued to shuffle things about and to get the dinner ready that she'd had planned, even though now she worried that it wasn't enough food or it wasn't good enough for Sophia.

"I can't even imagine what it must be like for a fourteen year old to find out all of this," Carol said.

"I'm sorry that this is so much for both of ya, but I just sorta found all this out too. I mean I didn't know about her neither, not for sure," Daryl responded.

Carol held up her hand to stop him from talking.

"We'll talk about it later, tonight after dinner if you want, but I really can't right now," Carol responded, turning her back entirely on Daryl to end the conversation for the moment.

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Sophia would have almost thought that it was a joke when she was told that she was being placed, no less than in a house that was looking to take permanent custody of her until she came of age, except that few of the women that ran her house had been given to joking and even less when it concerned potential adoption.

For some of them, adoption was something they saw as only a matter of time. For others, they saw it as something temporary since they were taken home and returned so often that they barely said their goodbyes anymore. For others still, they'd cling tight to dreams of parents they'd never seen or very nearly forgotten, or of relatives whose names they'd never heard or couldn't recall that would one day magically appear out of nowhere, sorry for the time they'd wasted, and take them home to lives that probably didn't exist and would never really be theirs.

Sophia couldn't really say that she had clung to any of those beliefs. She'd read enough books to know that's where most of the pretty stories were. They weren't real. She'd thought herself an orphan, and not one of the extraordinary and accidental ones either, just a common orphan that had ended up in a home because both her parents were dead. It wasn't a romantic story and it didn't keep her warm at night the way that some things the other kids believed seemed to do for them, but it seemed like the most logical story to her.

And as far as being chosen for families went, it had been some time since she'd imagined herself being chosen. There were a number of criteria that people seemed to have for the children that they chose. Younger children were preferred, boys over girls often times, and then if you were older there were things expected of you to be chosen, especially if you didn't want to be returned with some explanation given, true or otherwise, as to why you just weren't right for one household or another.

Sophia had never been taken to any household, at least not as far as she was aware, and even though she listened carefully to the "lessons" taught by one person or another on how to act and how to speak to find a home and stay there, she'd never really thought too much about the possibility that she'd end up going anywhere. She'd almost thought she'd probably just stay at the home until she was old enough to leave and then she'd accept the help offered to her to find a place to live and a way to afford it. She never seemed to be chosen, and she'd come to think that she never would be chosen.

And it had been some time since it had really hurt her feelings. She'd come to terms with it much more than most of the kids who seemed destined to remain in the home did.

Yet here she was, suddenly caught up, or so it would seem, in a conglomeration of the various daydreams of the others she'd grown up around.

When they'd first told her that she'd been specifically chosen by a family, that had been hard enough for Sophia to believe, and when they'd said that this family hoped to adopt her, it had seemed even more bizarre, but now she'd met the people that were to be her adoptive parents and the story they told seemed almost too amazing to be true.

They wanted to adopt her, yes, but in addition, the pretty woman that would be her adopted mother was, apparently, her birth mother…a creature that seemed almost mythological.

Sophia sat on her bed in the little room and thought about the whole thing, everything that the man, Daryl, had told her.

Somehow this woman, Carol Ann…her mother, might not remember too much about her birth. She might not remember much about her at all. He'd said it was because she'd been in a place, something like where Sophia had grown up, but Sophia doubted that was the case. She hadn't forgotten too much about her life at all, though even thinking that to herself made her laugh out loud at her own thoughts.

Maybe she had forgotten it, and maybe she simply didn't remember that she'd ever known it to begin with.

Still, this woman seemed nice enough in the short meeting that Sophia had with her. She seemed warm, but sad, and Sophia hoped she wasn't the one to make the woman sad.

Sophia hadn't ever really imagined what it would be like to have parents, though she had read a good number of stories about people with all kinds of families…big ones, small ones, good ones, bad ones…and she'd sometimes liked to daydream about what it would be like to placed in one of those kinds of homes and to have an actual family of her own. But she really saw those kinds of things for what they were, daydreams. And daydreams were something she'd been scolded once or twice for being prone to since that made you, apparently, aloof and that was undesirable for a good number of the people seeking children.

They wanted you to be quiet, but not aloof. They wanted you to be present, but not opinionated. Seen and not heard, that was the rule of thumb.

If you wanted to earn a family, and you wanted to keep it, you would be well behaved, polite, and helpful. You would learn to fit into their family instead of expecting them to adapt to you. And you didn't want to be too aloof because that could, apparently, be quite annoying and they would figure that you would never make anything of yourself because your head was in the clouds.

And if you were a girl? You couldn't make a very good wife and mother with your head in the clouds…and everyone who had heard that at the home had to take it at face value since very few of them had seen an actual wife and mother in action before.

Still, now that Sophia had this potential to have a family with a father and a mother, whether or not the woman was actually her birth mother or this was some strange delusion that the couple held, she was anxious to try to hold onto it. It wasn't something she was likely to get the chance at again if she messed up and got herself returned, so that meant that she had to do her best to exercise every "lesson" she'd ever heard from anyone about how to make these things work.

And if she'd made the woman seem so sad, already she was off to a bad start perhaps.

There was maybe something she could do about it, though. Hopefully it wasn't some kind of problem that couldn't be remedied.

Truth or not, Sophia liked the idea of the woman as her birth mother. Though she was curious to find out if it was truth, and if it was, she was curious to find out more about the whole thing. It seemed, to her, like it had the potential to be a very interesting story.

Sophia unpacked her things, few items admittedly, and then she settled down on the bed, not feeling ready to explore the house in case it wasn't really fitting for her to do so. She figured, at the moment, that the best thing to do would be to wait until dinner time. She would eat whatever she was served, declare it to be the best of that she'd ever eaten, whether it was true or not, and try to at least observe her new "parents" a little more.

She could play whatever game it was that they wanted her to play, and she could go along with whatever it was that they wanted her to go along with within reason.

After all, she didn't have anything to lose, and even if she didn't have all that much to gain at the end of it all, she was curious to see what it might be like to live in a family, no matter how odd they might be.