My name is Sophia Taylor. I am twenty-eight years old, and I live in Charleston, South Carolina, in a city that has built its entire identity around the preservation of beautiful facades while the foundations underneath quietly shift. My work is a perfect mirror of my life.
I coordinate restoration projects for historic hotels, buildings that wealthy tourists love to photograph from the sidewalk without ever really seeing. I spend my days repairing hand-carved crown molding and stabilizing centuries-old marble, filling cracks so carefully that no one who walks through later can tell they were ever there. I have become an expert at making things look intact.
For four years I had not sat at a dinner table with my parents in the same room. Not at Christmas, which I spent alone with takeout and a book I pretended to be absorbed in. Not at Thanksgiving, which I worked through because volunteering for the holiday shift felt less humiliating than admitting I had nowhere to go.
Not even for my birthday, which came and went acknowledged with a text message and a gift card to a restaurant in their city that I would never visit. I was the independent daughter, the one who had moved away and built something on her own terms and required no maintenance. That was the family narrative, and I had been living inside it for so long I had almost stopped noticing its shape.
When my parents finally agreed to fly south to visit me, something cracked open in my chest that I had been keeping sealed for years. A frantic, hopeful energy that I recognized even as I felt it as something that should probably be monitored more carefully. I wanted everything to be perfect.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
