Chapter 4
SOPHIA
Ian makes my coffee wrong on purpose.
I know he does it on purpose because he's made it correctly six days a week for three months, and every Wednesday he puts in two sugars instead of one.
When I call him on it the first time, he says his hand slipped.
The second time, he says the spoon was bigger than he thought.
By the third Wednesday, he just slides the cup across the counter with that crooked grin and waits.
Now, I know what to expect. Still, when I take a sip, I wince. “It's Wednesday again.”
“Is it?”
“You're doing the sugar thing.”
“What sugar thing?”
“The thing where you sabotage my coffee because you think it's funny.”
He takes a slow sip of his own—black, no sugar, the coffee of a man who treats flavor as an unnecessary complication. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”
I drink it anyway. I always drink it anyway, and he knows I will. It's a small, stupid, weekly thing that shouldn't matter at all, and I'd miss it terribly if it stopped.
Three months in Paris.
I don't know when surviving became routine and routine became something resembling a life.
It wasn't a single moment. It was slow. The cafe on the corner became a Tuesday and Thursday thing, then a daily thing.
The walks along the Seine started as Ian's idea and became something I reach for on my own, the way you reach for a coat when the weather turns.
At some point, I started buying groceries instead of eating whatever was already in the fridge, and at some point after that, Ian started coming with me, and at some point after that, we started arguing about what to cook, and the bickering became a language of its own.
We have a life here. Quietly, without either of us planning it, we built one.
“Grocery run,” Ian says, rinsing his mug. “We need actual food. You baked three loaves of bread yesterday.”
“Baking is therapeutic.”
“Baking is a distress signal when you're on loaf number three. Come on.”
The market is four blocks away, tucked into a narrow street that smells like fresh herbs and aged cheese and the specific, unfair perfume of French bread that makes every bakery in America feel like a personal insult.
Ian pushes the cart. He always pushes the cart—something about sight lines, which he explained once and I decided not to think too hard about.
I throw things in. He takes things out.
“Sophia. We do not need three kinds of Comte.”
“One is for cooking. One is for the board. And one is for eating at two a.m. when I can't sleep.”
“That's the same cheese three times.”
“It's three different ages. They taste completely different. The eighteen-month is nuttier, the twelve-month is creamier, and the—”
“I'll stop you right there.” He holds up both hands. “If you explain cheese aging to me one more time, I will leave you in this store.”
“You wouldn't.”
“Try me.”
All three blocks of Comte make it into the cart. They always do. Every week we do this, and every week I win, and every week he acts like next time will be different. It won't be.
“We need soup,” he says, studying a display of canned options.
“Soup is not dinner.”
“Soup is absolutely dinner.”
“Soup is what dinner gives up and becomes when it loses the will to live.”
He looks at me. “That is the most dramatic thing anyone has ever said about soup.”
“I stand by it.”
Two cans go in the cart anyway. That's his victory. We each have ours—mine is the cheese, his is the soup. The balance formed on its own. Neither of us negotiated it.
Back at the apartment, the kitchen fills with the smell of garlic and olive oil.
Ian takes over the cutting board the way he always does.
His hands go still and focused when he picks up a blade, like the knife is an extension of his arm and the onion was already halved and just didn't know it yet.
It's muscle memory from a life I don't ask about.
I handle everything else, which mostly means seasoning things by instinct and pretending that's a skill. Ian stopped questioning my methods after the thyme incident, which we've agreed never to speak of again.
The pasta comes together the way it usually does—a small disaster that resolves into something edible through stubbornness and Ian's last-minute saves.
I plate it. He pours wine. We sit at the table by the window where Paris is doing its evening thing, all amber light and rooftops going soft against a sky still holding the last blue of a long summer day.
“This is actually good,” Ian says around a mouthful.
“You sound surprised.”
“I am surprised. Last week you cremated a chicken.”
“That chicken was already dead when I started.”
“It was more dead when you finished.” He takes another bite. “But this. This is genuinely good, Crazy.”
I smile. “Thanks.”
He finishes before me. Stacks both plates and carries them to the sink. “I got dishes. Go sit. Take the wine.”
“You don't have to—”
“I want to. Go. Balcony.”
I grab the bottle and my glass and push through the balcony doors into the warm evening air.
The balcony is wide and long, wrought iron railing, white walls lined with two lounge chairs we dragged out here one evening and never brought back in.
The Eiffel Tower is lit, glowing gold against a sky that's turned the color of a bruise.
Below us, the city hums—scooters, voices, an accordion somewhere that could be real or could be Paris just being aggressively itself.
The summer air is thick and sweet, holding the warmth of the day long after the sun has dropped, and the window boxes on the floor below are heavy with jasmine that perfumes everything when the breeze shifts.
I pour myself another glass and settle into the chair, tucking my legs beneath me. The wine is good. The view is absurd. And for a few minutes I just sit with it, letting the night air move over my skin while the city stretches out beneath me.
Reth would love this balcony. He wouldn't say so.
He'd just stand at the railing with that quiet, consuming stillness, cataloguing every angle and sight line while pretending he wasn't also watching the lights.
And I'd watch him watching, and the watching would be its own kind of intimacy, the kind we built in the mountain house out of silence and proximity and the slow, terrifying collapse of every wall between us.
I wonder if he can see the Tower from wherever he is.
Probably not. He's probably in some concrete room with no windows, cleaning a blade, holding himself together with structure and ritual because those are the only things left holding him upright.
I wonder if he thinks about this city. About the wall he painted for me—the Eiffel Tower rising through a midnight sky beside Takada Castle in full bloom.
Two impossible things sharing the same space.
He put them on a wall and then he put them on his chest, cracked and broken, because that's how he carries beauty.
Like it's already been destroyed and he's just keeping the ruins.
I take a long sip of wine. The Tower glows.
The jasmine drifts. And I sit here in the life he built for me, missing the man who built it with an ache so deep it's become part of my posture.
Part of my breathing. Part of how I move through every room in this apartment, every street in this city, every hour of every day.
I miss the way he watched me.
God, I miss the way he watched me. Like I was the only real thing left in his world.
Like every breath I took was something he had to memorize in case it was taken away.
Even when we were fighting, even when I was screaming at him to let me go, his eyes never left me.
Heavy. Hungry. Possessive in a way that should have terrified me but only ever made me wet and aching and stupidly, dangerously alive.
Time is supposed to make it easier. But it’s been three months and it’s only getting harder. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to miss him since technically, he kidnapped me. Technically, he lied. Technically, he walked back into hell so I could stay safe.
But God… I miss him anyway.
I miss the way he said my name like it hurt him. I miss the weight of his body on mine, the way he looked at me when he was buried deep inside me—like I was the only real thing he’d ever felt in his entire ruined life.
I miss him so much it feels like a bruise that never stops blooming.
The balcony door slides open, and Ian drops into the other chair and reaches for the bottle.
“You know what I miss?” He pours, swirls, takes a sip with exaggerated suffering. “Beer. Cold, cheap, American beer. The kind that tastes like bad decisions and a gas station at two a.m.”
“You're drinking a forty-euro Bordeaux.”
“I'm aware. It's delicious. I hate it.” He shakes his head. “France has ruined me. I'm gonna go home one day and order a Bud Light and weep.”
I let out a laugh, more of a snort than anything elegant, the kind that makes wine nearly shoot out your nose and leaves your shoulders shaking. Ian's smile slides across his face in response, crinkling the corners of his eyes in that way that makes him look boyish despite everything.
“Oh, there she is,” he drawls, leaning back in his chair, legs stretched out. “The delicate little flower. Jesus, Crazy, that sounded like a dying walrus trying to mate. I’m genuinely impressed. Do it again.”
“Bite me.” I snicker.
“I’m serious, though.” He glances at me. “You should do that more.”
“Do what?”
Green eyes study me with intent, gentle, not mocking. “Laugh. Even if it sounds like a dying animal sometimes.”
“Maybe I don’t laugh more often because you’re just not that funny.” I smirk.
“I'm hilarious. You're just emotionally constipated.”
“Says the man who expresses affection through soup and insults.”
“That's the love language of my people.” He raises his glass. “To laughter, bad beer, and emotional constipation.”
I clink mine against his. “To France ruining us both.”