2. Alexander
— ? —
Alexander
The coffee was cold by the time I remembered it existed.
I’d poured it at six, maybe earlier. The apartment was quiet in that particular way it gets when Sophia’s already awake but choosing not to make noise.
I found her in the kitchen, dressed, hair still damp, eating yogurt standing up at the counter like she had somewhere to be.
She didn’t look up when I walked in. She also didn’t mention last night, the dinner, the phone call, the fact that I’d come home at two in the morning and found our bedroom dark.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning.” She scraped the last of the yogurt from the container. “There’s coffee.”
“Thanks.”
That was it. Nothing more to it. She rinsed her spoon, grabbed her bag, kissed me on the cheek with the efficiency of someone checking off a task, and left. The door closed softly behind her. No slam. No pointed silence. Just a Tuesday.
I stood there holding my mug, waiting for the other shoe. It didn’t drop. Sophia wasn’t the type to punish with silence. She was direct, sometimes brutally so. If she was angry, I’d know. She’d tell me. She’d probably tell me twice, in French the second time for emphasis.
So this meant she understood. The Milan piece, the insurance nightmare, the fact that I’d had no choice.
She got it. Of course she did. We’d been doing this dance for years now, and she knew the rhythm.
Temporary. All of it was temporary. The late nights, the missed dinners, the way I kept promising next month would be better. She knew I meant it.
I drank the cold coffee anyway. It tasted like penance.
By the time I got to the office, I’d already fielded three emails about the Milan situation, two calls from our insurance liaison, and a text from my mother asking if I’d gained weight. Camille met me at the elevator with a tablet and an expression that said today was going to be one of those days.
“The appraiser wants to meet at eleven instead of two,” she said, falling into step beside me. “I’ve already moved your eleven to one, and your one to three, but that puts you in conflict with the Haussmann Group call.”
“Push Haussmann to tomorrow.”
“They’re flying to Tokyo tomorrow.”
“Then they can call me from the plane.”
Camille made a note. She had a way of making notes that read as mild disapproval, but when I looked at her face there was nothing but pleasant efficiency.
She’d worked for me for four years now. Before that, my father.
She knew the company better than I did in some ways, and she never let me forget it.
“Also,” she said as we reached my office, “Sophia submitted the revised centerpiece design for Lumière éternelle. Three days ago. Pierre approved it yesterday.”
I stopped with my hand on the door. “What?”
“The cascade necklace. She reworked the center. It’s…” Camille paused, consulting her tablet like she needed to refresh her memory, though I knew she didn’t. “Quite striking, apparently. Pierre called it the best work she’s done.”
Three days ago. Sophia had redesigned the centerpiece of our flagship collection three days ago, and I was hearing about it from my assistant in a hallway. I’d been home. I’d slept in the same bed. We’d had breakfast together, or at least occupied the same kitchen during breakfast hours.
“I wasn’t aware she’d finalized anything,” I said, which was the diplomatic version of what I was thinking.
“She submitted it through the normal channels. Pierre’s team has been working on the production specs.” Camille’s voice was helpful, informative, entirely neutral. “I assumed you knew. I can pull up the files if you’d like to review them?”
“No. That’s fine. She’ll show me.”
Camille nodded and moved on to the next item, a vendor dispute that needed my signature.
I followed her into my office and let the day swallow me whole, but part of my brain stayed stuck on that phrase.
Three days ago. The redesign she’d been fighting for weeks.
The one that had kept her up past midnight, the one I’d given her that note about.
The open cage, the floating center. She’d cracked it, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Temporary, I reminded myself. The distance was temporary.
The morning bled into afternoon. I ate lunch at my desk, which meant I didn’t eat lunch, just stared at a sandwich while arguing with an underwriter who seemed personally offended by the concept of comprehensive coverage.
Camille appeared and disappeared at intervals, managing the chaos with the quiet competence that made her indispensable.
At some point my tie came loose. I didn’t bother fixing it.
At 3:47, according to the clock I was actively ignoring, Camille knocked on my open door.
“Sophia’s on line two.”
I was mid-sentence with the Haussmann Group, who had agreed to call from the plane but were now breaking up every third word. “Can you take a message? Tell her I’ll call back as soon as I’m done here.”
“Of course.”
She disappeared. I went back to Haussmann, to the static and the stuttered assurances about delivery timelines.
The call ran forty minutes. After that came the vendor dispute, then a brief but brutal conversation with our head of security about the Milan incident’s insurance implications, then a crisis with a shipment that had cleared customs in entirely the wrong country.
By the time I looked up, it was dark outside and my assistant’s desk was empty.
I called Sophia. It went to voicemail.
I tried again ten minutes later. Same result.
She was probably in her studio. She kept her phone on silent when she was working, had done so ever since some telemarketer interrupted her mid-sketch and she lost an idea she swore was going to change everything. I’d laughed at the time. She’d thrown a pencil at me.
The memory sat wrong in my chest. When was the last time she’d thrown anything at me? When was the last time I’d been close enough to catch it?
I gathered my things and headed home.
The apartment was quiet again, but differently. Warm light spilled from under her studio door. I could hear music, French and old, the songs she reached for when she was deep in a piece and didn’t want to surface. I loosened my tie the rest of the way and knocked.
“Come in.”
Sophia was at her drafting table, bent over a sketchbook I didn’t recognize.
She had a pencil tucked behind her ear and another in her hand, and she didn’t look up when I entered.
The room smelled like her, like turpentine and that vanilla hand cream she used, and for a moment I just stood there taking it in.
The slant of her shoulders. The way she held her breath when she was concentrating.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She made a mark, frowned at it, made another. “How was work?”
“Long. When did you call?”
“Around four.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “I finished the centerpiece. The actual piece, not just the design. Pierre had the workshop rush it. I wanted to show you.”
I wanted to show you. Past tense. I’d missed it.
“Camille was supposed to tell you I’d call back.”
“She didn’t.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t bother.” Sophia shrugged, a small motion that meant more than it should have. “It’s fine. Pierre took photos for the press materials. You can see those.”
I stepped further into the room, navigating around the stacks of reference books and the box of antique findings she kept meaning to organize.
Her studio was controlled chaos, everything in a place only she understood.
I used to love that about her, the way her mind worked in spirals instead of lines.
I used to spend hours in here, watching her make beauty out of nothing.
Now I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been past the doorway.
“I want to see it,” I said. “The actual piece. Not photos.”
“It’s at the workshop. They’re doing final checks.”
“Then show me the sketches.”
She looked up at that. Her expression was careful, neutral, the practiced blank she wore when she was deciding whether to trust me. I hated that look. I hated that I recognized it.
“You’ve already seen the sketches.”
“Not the recent ones.” I gestured at the table, at the unfamiliar sketchbook, at the sheets pinned to the corkboard above her desk that I was certain hadn’t been there the last time I’d really looked. Which was when? A month ago? Two? “You’ve been busy.”
“Launch is in three weeks.”
“I know. I just…” I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the knots there, the accumulated tension of too many days like this one. “You used to show me everything.”
Sophia set down her pencil. She looked at me for a long moment, a thought moving behind her eyes that she didn’t let me read. Then she said, very quietly, “You used to ask.”
The words landed like a verdict. I wanted to argue, to defend myself, to explain that I’d been drowning in Milan and insurance and my father’s legacy and a thousand other things that demanded pieces of me I didn’t have to spare.
But she wasn’t wrong. She was never wrong about the things that mattered.
“I’m asking now,” I said. “Show me what you’re working on.”
She hesitated. I watched her weigh it, deciding whether I was worth the risk. Finally, slowly, she turned back to the drafting table and pulled the sketchbook closer.
“It’s rough still,” she said. “Just concepts. The cascade redesign opened up some ideas I’d shelved years ago, and I thought…” She stopped, started again. “You remember that pendant I showed you in Bordeaux? The one in the antique shop, with the cracked enamel?”
“The ugly one.”