His Secret [Completed]

Chapter Twenty-Nine

A family meeting was called one evening after dinner. Sherry had been talking about it throughout that day, but no member of the family seemed to be in the house at the same time. At eight o'clock after the plates were loaded into the dishwasher and the movie selected, Sherry called the meeting.

The paused movie on the screen created tension as the members of the household waited for Alan to enter the room. A few minutes passed until he entered, carrying a glass of whiskey in one hand and his tablet in the other. A recliner at the end of the long L-shaped couch was his specific seat and once he made himself comfortable, Sherry began. "I spoke to Noah this morning and I have some good news." Sophia gulped and felt nervous whether the news was an announcement that he and Brooke's wedding was back on. "In a month's time, Noah has invited us to go on a family vacation with him."

A sly grin spread across Kelly's face. "Where to?"

"Your brother has arranged for all six of us to stay at his resort in Hawaii. The renovations have just been finished and he wants us to stay for a week. He will be coming along, of course. We leave on the twenty-sixth."

"All six?" Jack asked.

"Oh, I almost forgot, you are both invited," she told James and Sophia. "Noah was quite insistent on you being there," the statement was directed at Sophia who dropped her eyes to the ground.

"That all sounds great but I'm afraid I can't go," James announced. "I have a wedding that day and my partner is working a bar mitzvah." James was a freelance photographer and he recently set up a business in New York. While living in London, he owned a portion of a Photography Studio with a man who became one of his closest friends there. When he moved back to the states, he sold his friend his half of the company with the dream of starting one back home; it was because of this that James moved back. He'd told the McKenzies this during a Sunday lunch and the proud expressions on Alan and Sherry's face couldn't have been more rewarding to him. He felt as though he finally had a home and a loving family to come home to after a long day at work. "Someone can take my place, maybe a friend?" He glanced at Jackson and Kelly before turning back to Sherry.

"Jack, why don't you ask Mason to come along? He's a lovely boy. And he's always been respectable." Jack agreed and told his Mom he wanted to check with Noah first. After all, their brother was paying for the private jet to take them to and from. He was also losing potential profit by letting them stay at his resort free of charge, and Jackson knew Noah typically was not fond of that idea.

As soon as the family meeting began, it ended, and each member of the house went their separate ways. Jackson went to his room with James to play a video game, Kelly and Sophia to the boathouse to watch a movie and Alan and Sherry stayed in the living room. Sophia didn't know how to feel about Noah insisting she goes on the vacation too. She wondered whether it was his way of apologising, his way of giving her one last 'night of freedom' as it were, before she was banished from the lives of his family and her home state forever.

Kelly began looking through Sophia's closet, swiping the hangers from left to right and admiring the outfits. Slowly but surely, Sophia purchased more and more items of clothing to replace her older tatty items. It was the money she earned from working at MKT that paid for her clothing, and she wanted something worthwhile to come from it. Although the money she'd placed into a tin for saving still went untouched; she couldn't lose her safety net because, after all, that's what it was - it was her lifeline.

The nosey woman then searched through her drawers but Sophia didn't seem to mind, she was enjoying having company that night because it meant that her mind didn't wander to thoughts of Noah and the vacation that was right around the corner. Kelly spotted a small black hoodie in the depths of a drawer, the wording on the front readimg 'believe'. "I think this one is a little small for you," she said as she read the tag, the size was a boy's small. Sophia leapt off of the bed and ripped the hoodie out of Kelly's hand. She held it to her chest.

A small apology escaped her lips before she explained; "it was my younger brothers. He died of leukaemia." Tears welled in her eyes.

"I'm sorry." Kelly pushed all of the drawers closed and shut the closet door. "I shouldn't have gone through your things."

"It's okay, I find it hard to talk about, you know? It's been ten years and I still can't seem to form the words to describe it."

"We don't have to talk about anything if you don't want to."

Sophia sighed. "It's not that I don't want to. I wish I could talk about him and my life when he was still alive, but I can't. I want to keep his memory alive, but it's impossible when most of the time I wish I was up there with them."

"You can't think that way."

"I know," she sighed. "But when the world always seems to be against you, you begin to wonder if you even have a purpose in life, you know?"

Kelly shrugged. "I guess... You know, sometimes I wonder what I'm supposed to do with mine. I want to be a lawyer more than anything, but then I begin to wonder if there's something more I can do to help people. The reality is, I'm going to be a criminal lawyer, which means the worst of the worst could walk free because of me."

"Not necessarily, you could dedicate your career to those who have been wrongly accused," Sophia told her. "For you, there will always be a purpose in life... and please don't take this the wrong way, but for you and your family, money is no object. You could dedicate your life to charity and humanitarian work and your parents would support you one hundred per cent of the way. As for me... I'll be stuck in a nine to five job for the rest of my life."

Kelly then said the wisest words Sophia had ever heard, and they brought a new reality to her line of sight: "My grandmother always told me: 'Change your mindset to change your future. We can never succeed with a tainted vision of what we most desire'." Those same words repeated themselves in her mind over and over as the evening went on, and repeated again throughout the week. She knew she was going to make a career choice, she was going to strive for the career she wanted for her future. Journalism was always a passion, and she was going to make damn sure she pursued it.

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Thanks for reading!
I've been thinking for a while of maybe doing 2 updates a week rather than one on a Sunday and I'd love to know thoughts.
The updates would be Wednesday and Sunday.
Please leave feedback if that's something you want :)
-Sophi