10. Sophia
— ? —
Sophia
They finally found hard evidence, and the finding made everything worse.
I’d been called to a room on the second floor, one I knew from a hundred ordinary afternoons.
But this was different. A few of the senior people were there, the ones whose opinions moved through the house like weather.
And Camille, near the door, a folder held against her chest like she belonged there.
Alexander was already seated at the head of the table when I arrived. He stood as I entered, a gesture of courtesy that felt oddly formal given the circumstances.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “Please, sit down.”
I sat. The chair felt cold through my dress, and I resisted the urge to cross my arms over my chest in a defensive posture.
“What’s happening?”
Camille was the one who slid the folder across the table. Of course she was. Inside were photographs of the finished pieces laid beside my original drawings, and even from across the table I could see it: the small, deliberate ruinations that had turned my work into lesser versions of itself.
“More of them came out wrong,” Alexander said, his voice careful. “The bracelet. Two of the rings. Every one of them changed from the drawings you approved. And every change made in a hand that looks like yours.”
I knew those pieces. I’d bled over most of them. They were the culmination of everything I’d built as his creative director, the collection that would launch in just over a week and carry our name into the next decade. And someone had gone through them one by one and quietly poisoned each one.
“I didn’t touch those designs after I approved them,” I said. “You know my work. You know I would rather cut off my hand than send these out looking like this.”
“That’s the trouble,” Camille said gently, her reluctance a shade too practiced. “There’s no sign anyone else was involved. No break-in. Nothing forced. Just your own sketchbook, changed in your own hand.”
I looked at Alexander. He was watching me the way he watched a problem across a boardroom table, weighing me, calculating, everything in his face gone careful instead of kind. Like I was a case to be closed instead of his wife.
“What are you saying?” I asked, and I couldn’t stop looking at my husband.
“No one is accusing you,” the oldest of them said gently, in a way that accused me completely. “We only want to understand how this could have happened without anyone noticing.”
“It happened because someone wanted it to.” My eyes stayed on Alexander. “Someone in this house who knows my work well enough to imitate it. Ask yourself who that could be, and then ask yourself why you’re looking at me instead of at her.”
“We’re not accusing you of anything,” Alexander said, and his voice had shifted into a register I hated, careful and level, the voice he used on difficult people. Not his husband voice. “We just want to understand. When did you last have your sketchbook?”
“Yesterday. In the workshop, where it always is. It never leaves my table except to come home with me.”
“And at home? Where does it stay?”
I stared at him, disbelief creeping through my shock. “On my nightstand. Why does that matter?”
“It was in the apartment with us. If someone looked at it while you were sleeping…”
“No one touched my sketchbook. It never left my side.” I heard my own voice rising, becoming defensive in a way that made me sound guilty even to myself. “Alexander, you know I didn’t do this.”
“I’m not saying you did. I’m asking questions because we need to understand the timeline.”
“You’re asking questions like you’re interrogating me.”
Camille shifted in her seat, and I caught the small, satisfied glance she let herself have when she thought no one was watching. She had prepared for this conversation. She had been waiting for it.
“Sophia.” Alexander’s tone softened, but not enough. “Has anyone had your sketchbook? An assistant, a colleague, anyone who might have taken it home, borrowed it, had it for an afternoon?”
“No. Of course not. I would never hand my work to anyone.”
“What about the workshop? Could someone have taken it from your table while you stepped out, copied a page, put it back before you noticed?”
“It’s with me every hour of the day. In my bag when I work, on my nightstand when I sleep.” I was answering every question, cooperating fully, and I could feel the walls closing in anyway. “The only person who could get to it would be someone already inside our home.”
I watched Alexander register the implication, his jaw tightening as he processed the fact that I’d just narrowed the suspect pool to the two people who lived in our home.
“We’re not focusing on that possibility right now,” he said carefully.
“Why not? If my sketchbook never left our home, then either someone in our home did this, or…” I stopped myself before I could finish the sentence. “Or you think I’m lying.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re looking at me like you’re thinking it.”
The room went quiet. The others suddenly found the table very interesting. Camille’s face was a perfect mask of concern, and I couldn’t look at her without feeling my skin prickle.
“Alexander.” I leaned forward, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Do you think I did this?”
He hesitated.
That hesitation lasted maybe half a second, maybe less, but it landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.
My husband, the man who’d promised to love me through everything, the man who’d held me through my father’s funeral and supported me through years of building my career, hesitated when I asked if he believed I was capable of sabotaging my own work.
“I don’t know what to think right now,” he said finally.
I sat back in my chair. The leather creaked under me, absurdly mundane against the backdrop of my marriage crumbling.
“Someone altered my design specifications,” I said, and my own voice reached me as if from another room.
Distant. Disconnected. “Someone sent fraudulent requests to our suppliers using my name. I came to you about both incidents. I asked you to investigate. I’ve been trying to prove that I’m being targeted for weeks.
” I spread my hands on the table, palms down, like I could anchor myself to reality through contact with a solid surface.
“And now you’re telling me that the evidence makes you doubt my word. ”
“The evidence is concerning, Sophia. That’s all I’m saying.”
“The evidence is exactly why you should believe me. Why would I sabotage myself? Why would I undermine the collection I’ve spent two years designing? Why would I jeopardize everything we’ve built?”
“Those are good questions.” Alexander’s voice was too calm, too measured. “And I want to answer them. But I can’t ignore what’s in front of me just because the alternative is uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable.” I laughed, and it scraped my throat raw. “That’s what you’re calling this. Uncomfortable.”
Camille cleared her throat, a delicate sound that cut through the tension like a scalpel.
“Given how sensitive this is,” she said, so gently, so reasonably, “perhaps it would be best if Sophia stepped back from the collection until this is sorted out. Just until we understand what happened. For everyone’s protection. ”
I looked at Alexander. Waited for him to object. Waited for him to tell them that restricting his wife’s access was out of the question, that he trusted me, that there had to be another explanation.
“I think that’s reasonable,” he said.
The air left my lungs.
“Security will issue you a temporary badge with limited access,” he continued, not quite meeting my eyes. “Workshop, your office, common areas. Nothing connected to the Lumière éternelle digital files or the secure vendor communications.”
“You’re removing me from my own collection.”
“I’m protecting you,” he said, in the reasonable tone that always made me want to scream. “If someone is framing you, the safest thing is to limit your access until we can prove it.”
“And if you can’t prove it? If whoever is doing this is smart enough to cover their tracks completely? Then I’m just guilty by default, locked out of my work because my name is in the wrong places.”
“We’ll find the truth, Sophia.”
“Will you?” I stood up, and my chair scraped against the floor with an ugly sound. “Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve already decided what the truth is. You’re just waiting for the evidence to catch up with your assumptions.”
“You know that isn’t fair.”
“Do I?” I closed the distance between us until he had nowhere else to look.
“Because I keep waiting for the meeting where my husband walks in and tells the room his wife didn’t do this, and it never comes.
You consult security and you manage the optics, and somewhere inside all that careful process is the woman this is actually being done to. You haven’t looked at her once.”
His jaw tightened. A muscle jumped near his temple, the tell he’d never learned to hide, and underneath all that boardroom calm I watched him reach for control and come up short.
“The badge, Sophia.” He held out his hand, and he wouldn’t quite meet my eyes when he did it. “Security needs it tonight.”
The request went through me before I could brace for it.
Questions I could have handled. Another round of him searching my face for cracks, fine, I’d survived that twice this week already.
Watching my own husband hold out his palm and wait for me to surrender proof that I belonged here was a different kind of wound.
He wasn’t asking me to cooperate. He was asking me to agree that I might be dangerous.
I unclipped the badge. Instead of handing it to him, I set it on the table between us, because I couldn’t stand to feel his fingers brush mine while he took it.
“Eight years,” I said. “That’s what this badge is worth to you tonight.”
“That isn’t what this is.”