And then she was gone.

I am writing the narration in my book where my mother, Sophie, leaves her family for good. It is a very heartwrenching and emotional task for me to write this scene. I thought I would share a small piece of the rewriting of this story. I’ve gone through several rewrites of this passage. Of course, I have no actual writings of the scene other than letters from family members and lawyers to draw upon to make inferences. The time Frame is January/February 1952

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The train pulled out of Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof in the cold hush of early morning. A light snow was beginning to dust the tracks, swallowing the last outlines of the platform as the Hauptbahnhof receded behind her. Sophie sat stiffly by the window, gloved hands clasped in her lap, eyes fixed on the blurred smear of passing trees. She hadn’t said goodbye to Frank. She hadn’t kissed Danny one last time. She told herself it was better this way—cleaner, quicker—less pain for everyone.

In her luggage was only the essentials: a few dresses, her passport, the letter from the hospital about her mother’s condition. But what she carried in her chest was heavier—something unnamed, half-denial and half-defiance. She told herself she was choosing freedom, returning to the city where she once belonged, to the mother who needed her, to a version of herself she thought she’d misplaced in the shadows of married life.

But even as the train picked up speed and the French border drew nearer, Sophie sensed it—that this wasn’t an escape, not really. Behind her, she had left a child whose laugh had begun to sound like Frank’s, a man who, for all his flaws, had tried to hold on. And she had left a record—letters, petitions, court orders—each a silent witness to the fracture.

Years later, when Paris no longer felt like refuge but something closer to exile, when Danny was older and asking questions she couldn’t answer, when the choices she’d made circled back like birds that never forgot their flight paths—then, and only then, would she understand: the life she had fled had not let go. It waited, quietly, just behind the years.