Chapter 4 #2
Silence settles. But it’s not heavy or awkward or the kind that makes you aware of how loudly you’re breathing.
It’s just there. It’s just easy. For a long time, we sit there, drink in sync, our glasses rising and falling to some rhythmic metronome.
Bottle two appeared at some point, and neither of us commented on it, just poured from it as if we'd been born with the right to drink in this city, above this view.
Eventually, I say, “What were you before all this, Ian?”
“Before is a loaded word.”
I arch a brow at him.
“Fine,” he sighs, pulls a hand through his hair, and leans back staring up at the stars. “I was lost, Crazy.”
“How lost are we talking?”
“Like, a-manhole-cover-in-the-middle-of-Tokyo lost.”
“That is lost,” I agree, but can’t help the smile. Three months ago, I’d have needed subtitles to follow that deadpan.
I swirl the wine in my glass. “I didn’t know it then, but I think I was lost, too. Before him. Sometimes I wonder if I've always known he was there.”
“Explain.”
“I dunno. Him not being here now feels different from before I knew he existed. Before the mountain house, before any of it,” I trail off, searching for the right shape of it.
“I think I always had this feeling. Like the air behind me was occupied. I used to chalk it up to paranoia. Living alone in the city, you know?”
Ian’s quiet. Watching me the way he does when he's decided to let me arrive at something on my own.
“Now that he's gone—actually gone, not hiding in the shadows two blocks away—the absence has a different texture.” I look at the Tower. “It's like I spent years being held by someone I couldn't see, and I only realized how safe I felt once the hands let go.”
I take a sharp inhale, that black hole inside my chest pulsating. Ian never adds to the heaviness of a conversation, choosing to sidestep anything that has to do with feelings. But he listens, and that’s all I need.
Ian gives me a beat, then clears his throat.
“So, you're telling me you had a sixth sense for a six-foot-whatever stalker with a knife collection and a staring problem, and your takeaway is that it felt like safety?” He shakes his head. “Fuck therapy. All you need is a cryptic killing machine in your peripheral vision at all times, or you’ll bake yourself into a carb coma.”
I toss the last of my wine at him. It's barely a few drops, but it catches him square in the chest, a scatter of red drops blooming across his white shirt.
He looks down. Looks up at me. “Really?”
“You deserved that.”
“I deserved—” He gestures at the stain. “This was clean. I put this on twenty minutes ago.”
“Then you should've been funnier.”
“I was extremely funny. That's why you threw wine at me. People don't throw wine at unfunny people. They just leave.”
I give him a pointed look. “Well, I can't leave, can I?”
“Not with the way you speak French, no.”
“My French is getting better.”
“Your French is a crime against the Republic. Last week you told the butcher you wanted to kiss his grandmother.”
“I asked for a leg of lamb.”
“That is not what came out of your mouth.” He dabs at the stain on his shirt with his thumb, making it worse. “At least my French is better than yours.”
“Oh,” I pour myself more wine, “you mean when you asked the waiter where the bathroom was in French and got a cheese plate?”
“My French is perfect.”
“Ian. You asked for the toilet and they brought you Roquefort.”
He picks up the bottle and refills his glass, taking a long, deliberate sip before answering. “And it was the best Roquefort I've ever had, so who really won that exchange?”
I frown at him.
“You know what else?” Ian says. “You have questionable taste in art. That museum we went to on Tuesday—”
“The Musee d'Orsay.”
“The one with the big clock.”
I frown. “It's one of the most important impressionist collections in the world, Ian.”
“It's a building full of blurry paintings and a big clock.” He holds up a hand before I can argue. “I'm not saying I hated it. I'm saying I stood in front of that Monet for twenty minutes because you told me to really look at it, and you know what I saw?”
“The genius of light and color capturing a fleeting moment in time?”
“A pond. I saw a pond. With some weeds.”
I laugh. A real one, the kind that starts in my stomach and spills out before I can shape it. “You have the artistic sensitivity of a brick.”
“I'm a realist. It's a pond.” But he's smiling, and there's something fond in it, like standing in that gallery while I talked his ear off is something he's already decided to keep.
“I liked the clock, though. The way you can see the whole city through it. Time and Paris all layered together.” He pauses. “That was actually beautiful.”
“Ian the art critic.”
“Don't push it.”
The wine moves through me slow and warm, and the conversation drifts the way it does with us now—easy, unhurried.
He tells me about a woman at the market who tried to sell him a fish he's convinced was older than the building.
I tell him about the bakery owner who corrected my French so gently it felt like being slapped with a velvet glove.
We laugh at things that aren't that funny because laughing together has become its own kind of sustenance.
It's on the fourth glass that the laughter thins.
The Tower is still lit. The wine is still good. The jasmine still drifts up from below. But somewhere between the third glass and the fourth, the warmth loosens something I've been holding tight all day, and the ache behind my ribs swells past what I can hold.
“I miss him.” The words come out small.
Ian doesn't look at me. Keeps his eyes on the Tower. “I know.”
“It's been three months, Ian. And all I get is flowers every six days.”
“That's more than just flowers, and you know it.”
I glance at him. “Proof of life?”
“It's the only language he has left right now, and he's using it to tell you he hasn’t forgotten about you.”
A tear slips before I can stop it. Then another. I wipe them with the back of my hand, but more come, and somewhere between the wine and the Tower sparkling like it doesn't give a damn about my heart, I stop fighting it.
“What was the plan?”
“You know I can’t—”
“—tell me? I know. But honestly. Am I just supposed to stay here in Paris forever? Just exist and eat and walk along the river and pretend I'm not waiting for someone who might never come back?”
Ian stares at his glass. “He'll come back, Crazy.”
“You don't know that,” I say between tears. “We haven't heard from him. We don't know where he is or what he's doing or if he's even—”
“He's coming back, Sophia.” No smirk. No deflection.
His eyes on mine, green and steady. “I know him.
Better than anybody alive. Wherever he is right now, he's not just surviving.
He's moving pieces. Putting things in place.
Quietly, the way he does everything. That man has been three moves ahead of everyone his entire life.
He's not enduring this. He's engineering his way out of it.”
I wipe the tears off my face, leaning my head back, trying to catch my breath.
“And what am I supposed to do while he's out there engineering?
Sit here and bake bread and pretend I'm fine?
I'm not fine, Ian. I can't sleep. I can't think straight.
I'm walking through this city like a ghost wearing nice clothes, and every six days I get flowers from a man I can't touch, and I'm supposed to just—” my voice cracks, “—what? Be patient? Be strong? Wait like a good girl while I have no idea where he is, what he’s doing…what’s being done to him?”
Ian doesn't answer right away. He empties the wine bottle into his glass and stares at the label like it said something he needs a moment to sit with.
“When I met Reth, I was a kid in a bad situation with no way out and no reason to believe out was even a thing. He had every reason to walk past me. It was cleaner. Safer. Smarter.” Ian's jaw shifts.
“But he stopped. He asked me one question. And based on my answer, he made a choice that changed my entire life.”
He looks at me, jaw working once.
“He gave me the one thing he could never have for himself,” Ian says quietly.
“Freedom. That's who he is. He gives people the thing he can't keep.
Builds houses he can't live in. Protects people he can't hold.” He looks at me.
“You think a man like that builds you a life in Paris and then just doesn't show up?”
I'm crying properly now. I gave up pretending otherwise two glasses ago. “Then why hasn't he come? Why am I sitting on this balcony without him?”
Ian sits up straight, reaches over and takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine and squeezing once, firm and sure, like punctuation.
“Because the pieces aren't in place yet. And because coming to you before they are would put a target on you that no amount of planning could take off.” His voice is steady.
Patient. “He's protecting you the only way he knows how. By staying away right now. But I swear to God it won’t be forever.”
“I hate it.”
“I know.” He squeezes my hand again, and I let myself absorb the touch.
“I hate that he's out there doing God knows what and I'm here drinking wine and staring at a fucking Tower.” I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. “I need to know he's coming back to me. Because if he's not—”
“Then what, Crazy, huh? You move on?”
I drop my hands. “I don't know. I don't know what comes after him.”
“There is no after him for you. I’m no expert on love or soulmates and all that crap.
But I watched him look at you like you were the first real thing he'd seen in his entire adult life. And you? You love being that for someone. Makes you insufferable.” His mouth tugs up, just barely. “Also makes you you.”
A sob breaks out of me. Loud and graceless and past caring.
I fold forward and press my face into my hands.
Ian doesn't say anything. He just slides in behind me, hands gentle on my arms, guiding me back until I'm leaning against his chest, his legs bracketing mine.
Something in me gives. Three months of it, all at once.
He doesn't shush me. Doesn't say it's okay.
His arms stay around me while I cry in a way I haven't in weeks—huge, ugly, chest-wracking sobs that shake through both of us.
The kind of crying that empties you out.
Somewhere in the middle of it his fingers find their way into my hair.
Just resting there, warm and still and comforting.
By the time I stop, my face is wet and my head hurts and I've folded myself so deep into his arms it takes a minute to remember how to move.
“You’re gonna be okay, Crazy.”
“One day you're going to be sick of me crying on your shoulder,” I say, voice wrecked.
“Hasn't happened yet.”
My nose is stuffy from crying, and my lips part to take a breath. “I'm scared, Ian.”
“Of what?”
“That he won't come back.” I nestle deeper into him. It’s not something I decide to do, and more of a reaction to the warmth of him wrapping around me. “And that I’ll wake up one morning and you’re gone, too.”
His lips press to the top of my head. Soft. Unhurried. And stay there—not pulling back, and I feel the slow rise of his chest against my back as he breathes in.
“If something changes.” My voice cracks. “If you have to leave—”
“Sophia.” My real name. He almost never uses it. The sound of it in his voice, without the armor of Crazy, does something to my chest I'm not ready for. “I'm not going anywhere.”
“You can't promise that.”
“I just did.” He takes my chin between his fingers and lifts my face toward him. “I made Reth a promise to protect you when he can’t.” He holds my eyes, touches my chin gently. “And now I’m promising you that I’ll stay for as long as you need me to. Got it?”
I press my lips together.
“You're stuck with me, Crazy.” The nickname comes back and the armor slides into place, but what's underneath it is different now. Warmer. “Get used to it.”
This close, he looks different—the easy grin stripped back to something quieter, something that wasn't on offer before tonight. A half smile, just barely. Like a thing he didn't mean to show me.
A stray tear falls, and Ian catches it with his thumb.
“Okay,” I say quietly.
“That's my girl.”
I sit up and empty my glass, swallowing the last sip of wine. “But if the flowers stop—”
“They won't.”
“But if they do—”
“Those flowers are the only language he’s got right now, and he’s telling you to hold on.” He stands and holds out his hand, that familiar glint of mischief back in his eyes. “Bedtime. That hangover's going to be biblical, and I want it on record that I tried to stop you at glass two.”
“Don’t you mean at bottle two?” I take his hand and let him pull me up. The balcony tilts pleasantly and I list sideways, and Ian catches me by the waist without comment, steadying me until the world levels out.
“Okay?”
“Mm.”
“Right.” He keeps his hand at my back and steers me toward the door. “Walk. Slowly. No unnecessary heroics.”
We make it three steps into the living room before I stop.
“Ian?”
He rotates back toward me, eyebrow up.
“If he comes back, and something's wrong with him—like, really wrong, not just baseline broken—what do I do?”
He’s quiet for a moment, like he’s genuinely thinking what the best answer might be. “You show him that you’re not afraid of whatever he brought back with him. That's it.”
I think about that the whole slow walk down the hall. It sounds simple. It probably isn't.
Ian stops at my door, hands in his pockets, the mischief dialed back to something easier.
“Goodnight, Crazy.”
“Goodnight, Ian.” I push the door open, then pause. “Thank you. For everything.”
He shrugs, one shoulder, already turning away. “Don't make it weird.”
In the bedroom, the peonies on the nightstand are five days old—deep burgundy, almost black at the center, their heavy heads bowing. Tomorrow, new ones arrive.
Maybe.