Breath, Eyes, Memory Book 4, Chapter 32 Summary

  • Sophie visits her therapist, who's an initiated Santeria priestess. They discuss Sophie's escape to Haiti.
  • They discuss Sophie's discovery that all the women in her family had been "tested," as well as her feelings toward her mother.
  • She tells her therapist that she doesn't really want to remember and confront things: she just wants to forget.
  • Sophie explains that her grandmother "tested" her mother because it was just something that good mothers did, to protect their daughters. This made it hard for her to be angry with Ifé.
  • She reveals that her mother's pregnant. The therapist asks if Sophie is angry at her mom for having a sexual relationship, especially since she denied Sophie's desire to be with Joseph.
  • But Sophie seems to be done with anger because she feels sympathy for her mother. The pregnancy is obviously bringing back a lot of her old fears and causing mental turmoil.
  • The therapist wonders if Sophie ever thinks about her father, but Sophie says that she can't think of the rapist as her father.
  • Her therapist says she'll have to give him a face if she ever hopes to control her fear and anger towards him. She says that Martine is suffering because she never confronted her fears.
  • She also says that Sophie needs to imagine her mother as a sexual being. But Sophie can only see her suffering during sex, like she herself does. The therapist guesses this immediately.
  • Sophie confesses that sex, for her, is only a means of keeping Joseph from abandoning her. She feels that only Brigitte will never leave her.
  • And right there, she walks into the therapist's "trap": she wants her to understand that Martine didn't want her to leave with Joseph because she would be alone in the world.
  • The therapist asks Sophie if she went to the place where her mother was raped, while she was in Haiti. But Sophie says she only ran past it on her jog.
  • The therapist suggests that both Sophie and Martine return to that place and confront it—and be able to walk away from it in one piece. Then they'll be free.