4. Sophia #2
Three minutes ago I’d been defending my professional integrity against an accusation I hadn’t earned. Now I was supposed to smile and move on because the convenient rescue had arrived and the crisis was over.
The meeting wrapped up with handshakes and relieved laughter. Alexander caught my eye across the room and gave me a small nod. See? Fixed, everything’s fine.
I nodded back because what else was I supposed to do.
But I kept staring at the tablet on the table. My name, my hand, my design. Twisted into a design I never drew.
And across the room, Camille Leroy gathered her things with the quiet efficiency of someone who always knew exactly where to find what everyone needed.
The apartment was dark when I got home, which suited my mood perfectly. I went straight to my studio and didn’t turn on the overhead lights, just the small lamp clamped to my drafting table. The one that made the room feel like a cave instead of a workspace.
I pulled out my sketchbook. Not the official one, the coffee-stained leather journal I’d bought at a flea market in the Marais when Alexander and I were still dating. The one where I kept the designs that weren’t ready for anyone else’s eyes.
The kintsugi piece filled three pages. Cracks running through gold, deliberately broken and deliberately repaired. A center stone held not by perfect symmetry but by the visible history of damage survived. I’d started it weeks ago, but tonight the lines came faster. Angrier.
I sketched until my hand cramped, then kept sketching.
The door opened behind me. I didn’t turn around.
“I thought you’d be in bed,” Alexander said.
“I thought you’d still be at the office, doing damage control on the technical error that wasn’t.”
He didn’t argue with my tone. That was almost worse. He crossed the room and stood beside me, close enough that I could smell his cologne and the faint exhaustion underneath it.
“What are you working on?”
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.” He tilted his head, studying the open sketchbook. “This is beautiful. When did you start it?”
I set down my pencil. “Three weeks ago.”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“Yes, you have.”
His brow furrowed. “Sophia, I think I’d remember a piece like this. The gold work alone…”
“Two weeks ago. Tuesday night. You were on the couch with your laptop, and I sat down next to you with the sketchbook. I explained the whole concept. The kintsugi influence, the imperfection theme, the way the center stone represents…”
I stopped. His expression had shifted into one I recognized. The look of a man realizing he’d walked into a room he thought he knew and found all the furniture rearranged.
“You were answering emails,” I said. “You said you liked it.”
“Soph…”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t, and we both heard it.
“No, it isn’t.”
“I know.”
He stood there, pinned to the floor by his own failure. I should have felt vindicated. Instead I just felt tired.
“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember any of it. What else did I say?”
“You said you loved it. You said I should show it to Pierre.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “You even suggested a slight curve to the lower setting. Very specific feedback for a piece you apparently hallucinated.”
“I was probably on autopilot. The Frankfurt deal was…”
“I don’t care about Frankfurt. I’ve never cared about Frankfurt. I care that I sat next to my husband and showed him the most personal thing I’d created in years, and he gave me feedback he doesn’t remember while he answered emails from his assistant.”
The word hung between us. Assistant. I watched his jaw tighten.
“This isn’t about Camille.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“You didn’t have to. Sophia, I know today was horrible. But she found the file that saved the collection. She saved your reputation.”
“Someone put my name on work that wasn’t mine today.” I heard my own voice go flat and strange. “And my own husband couldn’t tell the difference.”
He flinched. Actually flinched, like I’d hit him.
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? You asked me if I’d forgotten what I designed. You asked who else had touched my sketchbook. You asked if I might have made the change myself and not remembered because I’ve been under pressure.”
“The room needed answers.” He set the tablet down like it had gotten heavy. “I was trying to help you.”
“You were trying to help everyone. The collection, the launch, the people watching. I was somewhere on the list. Maybe fifth.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then why did you ask if I’d simply forgotten?”
He didn’t answer.
I picked up my sketchbook, held it against my chest. The pages crinkled under my grip.
“I’d like to see it now,” he said quietly. “The design. If you’d show me.”
“No.”
“Sophia…”
“You don’t get to care because you finally noticed I stopped sharing.”
His hand reached toward the sketchbook. I pulled it away and his fingers closed on empty air.
“I’m trying,” he said. “Tell me what you need and I’ll do it.”
“I needed you to remember. I needed you to look at the altered file today and know, without anyone telling you, that I would never make that change. I needed you to be my husband before you were the CEO.”
“I believe you. I told the entire board I believed you.”
“After you asked me three different ways whether I might be wrong.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket. The sound was obscenely loud in the quiet room.
He reached for it automatically, and I watched him catch himself mid-motion. His hand stopped. His jaw set. He pulled out the phone, glanced at the screen, and silenced it.
“See?” he said. “I’m here. I’m choosing this.”
I laughed. It came out bitter and cracked.
“Don’t choose me now because I’m upset.” My voice came out as a stranger’s. Someone exhausted. “I needed you to choose me when I was still trying.”
“You make it sound like you’ve stopped.”
“Maybe I have.”
The words hit him hard. I saw it happen. Saw the moment he understood that the ground had shifted between us and he didn’t know how to shift it back.
“Sophia, wait. Please. Let’s talk about this.”
I walked past him to the door, the sketchbook still pressed against my chest like armor.
“I’m going to bed.”
“In the guest room?” His voice cracked on the question.
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
I stopped in the doorway. Turned. He looked so lost standing there in my studio, surrounded by half-finished designs he’d never really seen. The tie was loosened. The tell I’d cataloged years ago. The sign that Alexander Whitmore was coming undone.
“You’re right,” I said. “It didn’t have to be.”
I left.
The guest room had started to feel like mine.
The closet held more of my clothes than his did.
The nightstand drawer contained my reading glasses, my sleep mask, the lip balm I’d bought in a fit of optimism about self-care.
At some point this had stopped being a temporary arrangement and become the architecture of a marriage that had quietly rearranged itself around absence.
I sat on the edge of the bed with my sketchbook in my lap.
Three days ago, someone got into my sketchbook and changed the prong settings on the cascade necklace.
My linework, my notations, my hand imitated so precisely no one could tell the difference.
They made an alteration so specific that it would have been catastrophic but deniable.
A detail mistake. An error that could be blamed on stress and overwork, on a designer losing track of her own designs.
Then, at the exact moment the accusation landed, Camille found the original file.
I couldn’t prove anything. I didn’t have evidence, didn’t have motive, didn’t even have a coherent theory. Just a feeling like a splinter under my skin.
But I knew what my work looked like. I knew I hadn’t touched that file. I knew the rescue had arrived too perfectly, too completely, with just enough documentation to make everyone exhale and stop asking questions.
I opened my sketchbook to the kintsugi design. The cracks running through gold. The breaks made precious by what held them.
Someone had put my name on work that wasn’t mine, and the only person who’d noticed the wrongness was me.
Three weeks ago, I’d decided the necklace center didn’t need a doorway. It needed an anchor. Someone to stay.
I stared at the empty space where the center stone should go, and I wondered if I’d ever find someone willing to stay in a place that was already broken.
Outside my window, Paris glittered with the lights of ten thousand lives I knew nothing about.
Somewhere in this city, someone knew exactly what they’d done to me.
And I was starting to think I knew who.