17. Sophia
— ? —
Sophia
The night before the launch, I made one last attempt to reach for my husband.
I’d spent the day in the workshop, putting final touches on pieces that didn’t need touching, checking settings that had already been checked, doing anything to keep my hands busy and my mind quiet.
The gala was tomorrow. The collection was ready.
My career was about to reach its highest point, and I couldn’t feel anything but dread.
Alexander had been in meetings all day, the endless cycle of phone calls and press briefings that preceded every major launch.
I’d seen him twice in passing, both times surrounded by staff, both times too busy to do more than nod in my direction.
We were strangers who shared a name and a home and nothing else.
But I missed him.
That was the part I couldn’t explain to anyone, not even myself. I was furious with him, hurt beyond measure. I was planning to leave for Florence and possibly never come back. And underneath all of that, I missed my husband with an ache that felt physical.
I missed the way he used to look at me across a room, like I was the only person worth seeing.
I missed the way his hand would find the small of my back when we walked together, a casual claim of connection that had always made me feel anchored.
I missed falling asleep to the sound of his breathing and waking up tangled in his arms.
I missed being married to the man who’d been my home.
There was a version of us that used to be so easy it embarrassed me.
The second year we were married, the heat went out in the apartment in the middle of February, and instead of calling someone like reasonable adults, Alexander decided he could fix it himself.
He could not fix it himself. He watched three tutorials, bought forty euros of tools he never used again, and produced a sound from the boiler that I can only describe as a haunting.
We ended up building a fort of every blanket we owned in the middle of the living room floor, and he made hot chocolate on the gas stove and got the proportions catastrophically wrong, and we ate cold cheese and stale bread and laughed until my stomach hurt, and he looked at me over a candle he’d lit for warmth and said, entirely seriously, that this was the best night of his life.
The boiler stayed broken for a week. He kept saying we should call someone.
Neither of us did, because neither of us wanted the fort to end.
That was the man I married. The one who botched hot chocolate and lit candles and turned a broken boiler into the best night of his life because I was in the room.
Somewhere in the years since, I’d lost him to late nights and endless obligations and a company that always needed him more than I was allowed to.
I didn’t know when the fort-builder had become the man who forgot to kiss me goodbye.
I only knew I missed him with a physical ache, standing in a hallway of the empire that had swallowed him, hoping there was enough of him left to come home.
At seven o’clock, I found myself standing outside his office door.
The hallway was quiet. Most of the staff had gone home, leaving only the essential personnel who’d be working through the night to prepare for tomorrow. I could hear voices inside, Alexander’s low murmur and someone else responding, and I made myself breathe through the anxiety rising in my chest.
I was going to ask him to come home. That was the plan, such as it was. Just dinner, just the two of us. One ordinary evening before the chaos of the gala consumed whatever was left of us.
I reached for the door handle.
Through the glass panel, I saw Camille.
She was standing close to Alexander, closer than professional distance would allow, her body angled toward his in a way that suggested intimacy. He was at his desk, papers spread in front of him, and she was beside him, leaning in to point at a document.
“You look miserable,” she said. Her voice carried through the not-quite-closed door, clear enough that I could hear every word.
“I’m tired.”
“Because of her?”
Alexander’s head snapped up, his expression hardening. “Be very careful what you say about my wife.”
“I’m not saying anything against her. I’m saying you look exhausted, and I’m worried about you.” Camille moved closer, and her hand came up to rest on his arm. “You don’t have to pretend with me, Alex.”
Alex.
The name landed square in my chest. She’d been calling him Alexander for weeks, ever since he’d corrected her at my request. But now, in this quiet office, with no one watching, she’d gone back to the name that was supposed to be mine.
The intimate name. The name I’d given him eight years ago because I wanted to be the one person who called him by a soft name.
“I’m not pretending.” Alexander’s voice was strained, carrying the exhaustion of weeks of conflict. “I’m trying to hold everything together until tomorrow.”
“And then what? You keep holding it together until you break?” Camille’s hand slid up his arm to his shoulder, and I watched her fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket. “Let me help. Let me be here for you the way I’ve always been.”
“Camille…”
“You’re a good man, Alex. You deserve someone who sees that. Someone who doesn’t make you feel like everything you do is wrong.”
“My wife doesn’t make me feel that way.”
“Doesn’t she?” Camille stepped closer, and now she was in front of him, her body blocking his view of the door. “I see the way you tense when she walks into a room. I see how hard you work to please her and how often it isn’t enough. You shouldn’t have to live like that.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know what I see.” Her hands came up to cup his face, the gesture so intimate that my stomach turned, bile rising in my throat. “I know that you’re unhappy. And I know that I would never make you feel the way she does.”
Then she kissed him.
Her mouth pressed against his, her hands holding his face, her body leaning into him with the confidence of someone who’d been planning this moment. Alexander went rigid, frozen in place, his hands hovering at his sides like he’d forgotten how to use them.
I stopped breathing.
Through the glass, I watched my marriage end in a gesture that lasted forever and no time at all. Camille’s lips on my husband’s. Her hands on his face. The position of their bodies, close and intimate, everything I’d been afraid of made visible, made real, made undeniable.
I didn’t wait to see what happened next.
I slammed through the door so hard it hit the wall behind it, the crash echoing through the empty hallway like a gunshot.
“Get away from him.”
Camille spun around, her face draining of color. Alexander was on his feet, pushing her away, his expression a mask of horror.
“Sophia, this isn’t what it looks like.”
“Don’t.” I grabbed the first thing I could reach, a glass paperweight from his desk, and hurled it at the wall. It shattered with a sound that matched the fracturing in my chest. “Don’t you dare tell me what it looks like.”
“She kissed me. I didn’t…”
“I know.” My voice came out strange, high and thin, barely recognizable as my own. “I saw. She kissed you and you stood there like a statue and you didn’t push her away fast enough for it to matter.”
“Sophia, please.” Camille stepped forward, her hands raised in supplication. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I never meant to…”
“Don’t speak to me.” I pointed at her, my hand shaking so badly I could barely hold it steady. “Don’t you dare speak to me. You’ve been working toward this for months, and now you’re going to pretend it was an impulse?”
“I wasn’t working toward anything. I care about Alexander, and I…”
“You care about him. You care about him.” The laugh that came out of me was ugly, a sound that hurt to make.
“You’ve been inserting yourself into my marriage since the day you started here.
The small errands and the schedule changes and the nickname and the touching.
All those little moments you claimed were innocent, all those boundaries you kept pushing while my husband told me I was imagining things. ”
“Sophia.” Alexander moved toward me, his hands reaching.
“Don’t touch me.” I backed away so fast I knocked into the bookshelf behind me, photographs rattling against wood. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“I didn’t kiss her back. I swear to God, Sophia, I didn’t kiss her back.”
“I believe you.” The words tore out of me, ragged and raw. “I believe you didn’t kiss her back. I believe you were shocked and frozen and you didn’t know what to do. And none of that matters.”
“How can it not matter?”
“Because she felt comfortable doing it.” I was crying now, ugly tears streaming down my face without my permission.
“She’s spent months watching you dismiss my concerns and make me feel crazy for seeing what was right in front of me.
And now she’s kissed you in your office, and somehow I’m supposed to believe this came out of nowhere? ”
“It did come out of nowhere.”
“Nothing comes out of nowhere, Alexander. Things like this grow. They grow from late nights and shared meals and intimate conversations and all those little moments that don’t mean anything by themselves.
” I dragged the back of my wrist across my cheeks, but the tears kept coming.
“The kiss is on her. Everything that made her think she could do it is on you.”
“I didn’t stop being your wife tonight, Alexander. I stopped being your wife every night you chose the office over the door I was standing behind.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. It isn’t.” I laughed, and it came out in pieces. “I loved a man who kept me the way you keep a light on in a room you never enter. Just in case. Never because you wanted to be in it.”
“Sophia-”
“I was the most loyal thing you owned, and you left me on a shelf until someone else reached for you.”
Each word struck home. I watched Alexander absorb them, his face coming apart by degrees as he understood what I was saying.
“I never encouraged this.”
“You never stopped it either. Every time I told you something felt wrong, you explained why I was overreacting. Every time I asked for boundaries, you defended her right to exist in our lives. You made space for her, Alexander. You made so much space for her that she thought she could fill it.”
I turned to the bookshelf, my eyes landing on our wedding photo. The frame sat on the second shelf, slightly dusty, a picture from the garden in Provence where we’d said our vows. I looked so happy in that photo. We both did. Like people who had no idea what was coming.
I picked it up and threw it.
The glass shattered against the floor, the frame splitting apart, the photo landing face-down in a spray of debris.
“Sophia, stop.” Alexander was moving toward me again.
“I came here to ask you to have dinner with me.” The confession ripped out of me, raw and bleeding.
“I was standing outside your door trying to figure out how to ask my own husband to come home, to sit across from me at our table, to be the person I married for one more night before everything changes.”
“Then let me do that. Let me come home with you now.”
“While she was kissing you. While I was standing outside trying to remember how to reach for you, she had her hands on your face and her mouth on your mouth.” My arms crossed over my chest without my telling them to, a shield against a cold that had nothing to do with the room.
“How am I supposed to come back from that?”
“We’ll figure it out. Together. We’ve survived worse than this.”
“Have we?” I looked at him, at this man I’d loved for eight years, and I didn’t recognize anything. “Or have we just been pretending to survive while everything slowly fell apart?”
I pulled off my wedding ring.
The metal slid over my knuckle easily, too easily, like it had been waiting to leave. I held it in my palm for a moment, feeling the weight of everything it represented. Our vows and promises. Our life together.
Then I set it on his desk.
“Sophia, don’t.” Alexander’s voice cracked, breaking on my name. “Please don’t do this.”
“I didn’t do this tonight, Alexander. Tonight is just when I finally stopped pretending I could survive it.”
“We can fix this. Whatever you need, whatever it takes. Therapy, time, space. I’ll fire Camille. I’ll step back from the company. Just tell me what to do.”
“I’ve been telling you what to do for years. You just weren’t listening.”
I walked toward the door. My legs felt strange, disconnected from my body, carrying me forward through sheer momentum. I was aware of Camille crying somewhere behind me, of Alexander calling my name, of the shattered glass and broken frame on the floor.
“Sophia, please. Don’t leave like this.”
I stopped at the doorway. Turned to look at him one last time.
“I’m not leaving because of the kiss. I’m leaving because I spent eight years telling you I was lonely, telling you something was wrong, telling you I needed you to see me. And you chose to see her instead.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true, Alexander. Every time you defended her, every time you dismissed my concerns, every time you picked the reasonable explanation over trusting your wife, you were choosing. And you kept choosing until she felt comfortable kissing you in your office the night before the biggest launch of our careers.” I gripped the doorframe, needing the support.
“I can’t do this anymore. I don’t have anything left. ”
“I love you.”
“I know you do.” My voice broke on the words, fracturing into pieces. “That’s why this hurts so much.”
I walked out of his office, down the hall, through the lobby, out into the Paris night. I didn’t know where I was going or what came next. I just knew I couldn’t be in that building for another second.
Behind me, I heard Alexander call my name one more time.
I didn’t look back.