14. Sophia
— ? —
Sophia
Alexander stopped touching me.
It happened gradually, the way most losses do, so slowly I almost didn’t notice until the absence became impossible to ignore.
First the casual touches disappeared: the hand at my waist when he passed behind me in the kitchen, the fingers brushing my shoulder when he wanted my attention, the absent-minded way he used to pull me against him while we watched television, his arm draped around my shoulders like it belonged there.
Then the intentional touches faded. He stopped reaching for my hand across the table.
Stopped kissing my forehead when he came home.
Stopped that thing he used to do where he’d tuck a strand of hair behind my ear while I was talking, as if he couldn’t help but connect with me even when his mind was elsewhere.
Each absence was small on its own, barely noticeable, but they accumulated like snowfall, each one adding to the weight until suddenly I was buried.
I told myself it was a response to the distance I’d created.
I’d been sleeping in the guest room for weeks now, and I’d stopped reaching for him.
The message I’d sent through silence and withdrawal was that I needed space, and he was respecting that.
That was what I’d asked for, wasn’t it? Space to breathe and think.
Space to figure out whether our marriage could survive the accumulated wounds of eight years.
But respect shouldn’t feel like erasure.
The morning it crystallized was a Tuesday, one of those gray October days when the light through the windows was pale and cheerless and the world felt muted.
Alexander was getting ready for work, adjusting his tie in the hallway mirror, and I was making coffee in the kitchen.
This had been our routine for years: him getting dressed while I caffeinated, a kiss goodbye before he left, mundane intimacies that threaded through our days and connected us even when everything else felt frayed.
I heard him pick up his briefcase from the table by the door.
Heard his footsteps approaching the kitchen doorway, the familiar cadence of his walk that I could identify from any room in the apartment.
I turned toward him without thinking, my face tilting up the way it always did, expecting the press of his lips against mine that had started every morning for eight years.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said.
The door closed behind him before I realized what had happened.
I stood in the kitchen with my coffee going cold in my hands, turning the absence I’d been waiting for over in my mind. My face was still tilted up, still anticipating a kiss that hadn’t come, the muscle memory of our marriage caught in the act of expecting a ritual that no longer existed.
He hadn’t kissed me goodbye.
I replayed the moment in my head, searching for signs I’d missed. Had I looked unwelcoming, held myself in a way that said I didn’t want him close? Had I done or said anything that told him I preferred the distance? Had I become someone who did?
Or had he simply stopped wanting to bridge it?
The question followed me to Whitmore Maison, through meetings and workshops and conversations I only half heard.
I watched Alexander across the conference room and tried to remember the last time he’d reached for me.
The last time he’d initiated contact, not as apology or comfort, but just because he wanted to feel my skin under his fingers.
I couldn’t remember. The timeline had blurred into a long stretch of absence punctuated by arguments and silence, and somewhere in that blur, my husband had stopped touching me, and I hadn’t even noticed when it started.
Alexander found me in the workshop that afternoon, and I knew from his face that the news was bad before he said a word.
“I need to show you this,” he said. He set my sketchbook on the table between us, open to the cascade necklace, and beside it a printout of the version that had gone to the workshop floor. “They’ve done it again. These don’t match.”
I looked. And the floor tilted under me again.
Someone had been into my designs again. Not clumsily.
Carefully, the way only a person who understood my work could.
A stone moved here. A proportion softened there.
Small, deliberate alterations that turned my pieces into slightly worse versions of themselves, mistakes calculated to make people whisper that maybe the great Sophia Laurent had lost her edge, that maybe she wasn’t as careful as she used to be, that maybe marrying the boss had gone to her head.
“That isn’t my work,” I said. My voice came out thin. “I didn’t draw that. Someone changed it.”
“I know.” He rubbed a hand over his face.
“This one surfaced a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been trying to trace how it got through before it reached the floor - quietly, so I wouldn’t have to put another one of these in front of you right after everything.
I didn’t want to say anything until I understood it. ”
I stared at him. “A couple of weeks.”
“Sophia-”
“You’ve known for a couple of weeks that they’d hit another piece, and you said nothing.
” The betrayal of it landed somewhere deeper than the sabotage itself.
“I’ve been bracing every day for the next one to come back wrong, and you were sitting on this the whole time, deciding for me what I could handle. ”
“I didn’t want to frighten you before I understood what was happening.”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“You keep using that word.” I pushed back from the table, needing distance, needing air, needing to be anywhere other than in this room hearing that my own husband had watched me suffer and said nothing.
“Protecting me. As if deciding what I get to know about my own life is a kindness instead of another way you’ve taken control. ”
“Sophia, I understand you’re upset…”
“No, you don’t understand.” I turned to face him, and I let him see exactly how calm I was. Frighteningly calm. “You don’t understand anything, Alexander. Because if you did, you’d know that finding out you kept this from me is worse than the sabotage itself.”
I stood at the window with my back to my husband, watching the Paris skyline blur through eyes that refused to focus.
“Sophia.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you immediately. I just thought, after everything between us, after how hard the past few weeks have been, I didn’t want to add another burden until I knew for certain.”
“Another burden.” I laughed, and it came out hollow, scraped raw. “That’s what I am now? A burden you’re managing?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said.” I turned to face him, and I saw him register the distance in my expression, the wall I’d built while his back was turned. “None of that is even the worst part, Alexander. Do you know what the worst part is?”
He waited, his face carefully still.
“You don’t touch me anymore.”
His expression cracked. Surprise, first, then confusion, then a pain that looked almost like recognition. “What?”
“You stopped touching me. I don’t know exactly when, but I noticed this morning.
You didn’t kiss me goodbye. You walked right past me like I was a piece of furniture, like I was a lamp or a bookshelf, like I was decoration in your apartment instead of the woman you married.
” My voice wobbled, and I hated it. “And I keep telling myself it’s because I’ve been distant, because I’ve been sleeping in the guest room, because I’ve made it clear I need space.
But this morning I turned toward you expecting your kiss, and you just… left.”
“Sophia, I…” He pushed a hand through his hair, the gesture I knew meant he was trying to find words that wouldn’t come. “I don’t know what you want from me anymore.”
“I want you to want me.”
“I do want you.”
“Then why do you treat me like I’m made of glass?
Why do you walk past me without touching me?
Why do you sleep on your side of the bed like there’s a wall between us?
” The questions poured out, all the things I’d been holding back, all the confusion and hurt I’d been trying to process alone.
“You’ve pulled away from your own touch.
You’ve stopped waiting for me. You’ve made it clear how deeply I’ve hurt you.
I keep reaching for you and getting nothing back, so I’ve stopped reaching. ”
“I’m trying to stop hurting you.”
“So you decided to stop loving me out loud?”
The words echoed through the workshop, too big for the space, too raw for a conversation that should have happened somewhere private. Alexander’s face broke open and reassembled itself in the span of a breath.
“Every time I reach for you lately, you flinch,” he said quietly, his voice cracking slightly on the admission.
“Every time I try to close the distance, you step back. I see it in your body, Sophia. The way you brace when I come near. The way you angle away from me in bed. I’ve been trying to give you the space you’ve been asking for. ”
“I never asked for this.”
“You asked me to stop choosing everyone else over you. You asked me to notice when I was hurting you. You asked for distance, and I’m trying to respect that.”
“There’s a difference between giving me space and making me feel unwanted.
” I pressed my hands flat against the drafting table to keep them still, the afternoon sun streaming through the windows doing nothing to warm me.
“I still wait for your hand at my waist when you pass behind me. I still expect your kiss before you leave. I still reach for you in the middle of the night before I remember you’re not there.
” My voice broke on the last word. “I thought you wanted me to stop needing those things. I didn’t realize you’d stopped wanting to give them. ”
Alexander said nothing for a while. When he spoke, his voice was rough, scraped raw.
“I thought you wanted me to stop.”
“I wanted you to notice I was hurting. I didn’t want you to stop wanting me.”
The distance between us felt impossible. We were standing in the same room, close enough to touch if either of us reached out, and yet it might as well have been miles. Oceans. The entire width of the years we’d spent hurting each other.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said finally. “I don’t know how to be close without hurting you. I don’t know how to give you space without losing you. Every choice I make seems to be wrong, and I’m terrified that if I reach for you again, you’ll pull away, and I won’t be able to survive it.”
“So you stopped reaching first.”
“I thought it was what you needed.”
“I needed you to fight for us.” The tears came, finally, sliding down my cheeks without permission. “I needed you to keep showing up even when I was pushing you away. I needed you to prove that your love was stronger than my fear.”
We stood there, separated by a distance neither of us knew how to cross. I wanted to go to him. I wanted him to come to me. But the space between us had calcified into glass we couldn’t move through, and neither of us seemed to know how to break it.
“What do we do now?” Alexander asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I love you, Sophia. That hasn’t changed.”
“I know you do.” I wiped my face with the back of my hand, frustrated by the tears, frustrated by everything about our marriage that had brought us here. “I love you too. But I’ve lost the trick of trusting that love. I don’t know how to believe it means what it used to mean.”
He took a step toward me, then stopped. I saw him make the decision, saw him second-guess it, saw him retreat back into caution.
“I want to hold you,” he said, his voice raw. “I want to cross this room and wrap my arms around you and tell you everything is going to be okay. But I don’t know if you’d let me. And I don’t know if I could stand it if you pulled away.”
“Try.”
He closed the distance between us. His arms came around me, tentative at first, then tighter when I didn’t resist. I pressed my face against his chest and let myself cry, really cry, the way I hadn’t allowed myself in weeks.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into my hair. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know.”
“I’ll do better. I’ll be more present. I’ll stop trying to protect you from information and start trusting you to handle it with me.”
“I know.”
We stood like that for a long time, holding each other in the workshop while the sun set outside and the building emptied around us. It was the first real moment of connection we’d had in weeks. Maybe months.
But when we finally pulled apart, the distance crept back. We went home in separate cars. I went to the guest room. He went to ours.
And somewhere in the middle of the night, I fell asleep on the couch because the guest room felt too lonely and our bedroom felt too far.
I woke to darkness and the sound of footsteps. Alexander was standing over me, silhouetted by the light from the hallway, his face in shadow. I saw him reach toward me, saw his hand hover over my shoulder as if to lift me and carry me to bed the way he’d done a thousand times before.
Then he pulled back.
He covered me with a blanket instead, tucking it around my shoulders with careful hands, his fingers gentle against the fabric. I felt him stand there for a moment, watching me, his presence a warmth I could feel but not reach.
Then his footsteps retreated down the hall.
I lay in the dark listening to him go, and it finally landed: Alexander wasn’t withholding affection because he was distracted or oblivious or choosing someone else.
He was afraid.
Afraid that I didn’t want his touch anymore. Afraid that every attempt at closeness would hurt me again. Convinced the woman he loved had finally learned to stop reaching for him.
The tragedy was that we were both drowning in the same fear.
And neither of us knew how to say it out loud.