24. Alexander
— ? —
Alexander
Three years changed a person.
I caught my reflection in the window of a café in Saint-Germain, and for a moment I didn’t recognize the man looking back.
Thinner than I’d been, the angles of my face sharper, my clothes hanging differently on a frame that had forgotten how to carry weight.
I’d stopped bothering with the precise grooming that had once been automatic.
My hair was longer than I’d worn it in years, and there were shadows under my eyes that never quite faded no matter how much sleep I got.
Which wasn’t much. Sleep had become difficult somewhere around the first anniversary of the divorce, and it had never gotten easier.
“You look terrible.”
I turned. Henri was standing on the sidewalk behind me, his expression caught between concern and the particular brand of brotherly disapproval he’d perfected over forty years.
“Thank you.”
“I’m serious, Alexander.”
“Unfortunately, so am I.”
He fell into step beside me as I continued walking.
I was on my way home from the office, which I left at reasonable hours now.
Six o’clock, sometimes earlier. The mountain of work I’d once used to bury myself had been systematically distributed to people who were better at it anyway, and Whitmore Maison had thrived without my constant presence.
That had been a bitter lesson. The company I’d sacrificed my marriage for didn’t actually need me to sacrifice anything.
“Mother’s worried about you,” Henri said.
“Mother’s always worried about me.”
“She thinks you’re not taking care of yourself. She thinks you’re still…”
“Still what?”
Henri sighed. “Still grieving.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Of course I was still grieving. I would always be grieving, in some small way, for the life I’d lost. The fact that I’d lost it through my own failures didn’t make the grief any smaller.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not fine. You haven’t been fine in three years.” Henri stopped walking, and I stopped too, turning to face him. “Have you talked to anyone? A therapist? A friend? Anyone who might be able to help you work through whatever this is?”
“This is my life, Henri. I’m working through it by living it.”
“You’re not living it. You’re enduring it.” He shook his head. “You go to work. You come home. You don’t date. You don’t socialize. You haven’t brought anyone to a family dinner since Sophia left.”
“I haven’t found anyone worth bringing.”
“Have you looked?”
I thought about the dates I’d attempted in the first year.
Coffee with a colleague’s friend. Dinner with a woman my mother had introduced me to.
An evening at the opera with someone from a charity board.
Each one had ended the same way: polite conversation, no connection, a gentle explanation that I wasn’t ready for anything serious.
I’d stopped trying after that. It felt dishonest to pretend I had anything to offer when my heart was still occupied by someone who’d moved on without me.
“I’m not interested in dating,” I said. “That’s allowed.”
“It’s allowed. It’s also concerning when your little brother has a more active social life than you do.”
“You’ve always been more charming than me.”
“That’s true, but it’s not the point.” Henri put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m worried about you, Alexander. We all are. You’ve changed so much since the divorce, and most of it’s good, but this… this isn’t healthy. You can’t spend the rest of your life alone.”
“Watch me.”
I said it as a joke, but we both knew it wasn’t.
“Just think about it,” Henri said. “That’s all I’m asking. Think about whether this is really how you want to spend the next forty years.”
He left me at the corner, heading toward his own apartment where Céleste and the kids were waiting. I watched him go, then continued toward the building I’d shared with Sophia.
The apartment hadn’t changed much in three years.
I’d rearranged some furniture, replaced a few things that carried too many memories.
But her studio was still there, untouched except for occasional cleaning.
I couldn’t bring myself to convert it into anything else.
It was the erasure of the last physical evidence that she’d existed in my life.
I made dinner alone, the way I did every night. A simple plate, healthy enough that my body kept functioning even when my appetite didn’t cooperate. Then I settled into the green armchair by the window, the ugly beloved thing we’d found at the flea market in Montmartre, and opened my laptop.
I’d developed a habit over the last three years. Every few weeks, I searched for her name. Not to spy, not to monitor her life, just to see how she was doing. To know she was thriving somewhere, even if it wasn’t with me.
The latest article was from an Italian design magazine.
A profile of her atelier in Florence, which had grown from a small studio into a respected name in artisan jewelry.
The photographs showed her workspace, filled with light and tools and pieces in progress.
They showed her staff, young jewelers she’d trained in her techniques. They showed her.
Sophia looked happy.
That was the thing I kept coming back to, the thing that hurt in the best and worst ways simultaneously.
She looked genuinely, thoroughly happy. Her hair was still short, though styled differently than I remembered from the photograph I’d seen years ago.
She was laughing in one of the pictures, her head thrown back, her whole face transformed by joy.
I studied that photograph longer than I should have.
She’d built all of it without me. A life, a career, a future that had nothing to do with Whitmore Maison or the woman she’d been when we were married. She’d found herself, exactly like she’d said she needed to.
Part of me wanted to call her. To hear her voice. To tell her how proud I was of everything she’d accomplished.
But I’d given up that right when I signed the divorce papers. Respecting the life she’d built meant staying out of it, no matter how much I wished things were different.
I closed the laptop and went to the journal I kept in my desk drawer.
It was the fourth one I’d filled since she left. Pages and pages of letters I’d never send, thoughts I’d never share, the running conversation I couldn’t stop having with a woman who wasn’t there to hear it.
Sophia,
I saw the article about your atelier today. You looked happy. Really happy, happy the way you used to be before I wore you down with my absences and my priorities and my failure to understand what you needed.
I’m proud of you. I know I have no right to say that, but I am. What you built is extraordinary, and you did it on your own terms, without anyone else’s schedule or expectations or family legacy weighing you down.
My hope is that Florence is everything you wanted, that the life you’re living feels like yours in a way our marriage never did.
I still think about you every day. I still reach for you in the morning before I remember. I still catch myself wanting to tell you things, share things, show you things that would only make sense to someone who knew me the way you did.
I don’t know if I’ll ever stop loving you. I don’t know if I want to.
But I know I have to let you be happy, even if I’m not part of that happiness anymore.
Always, Alexander
I set down the pen and looked at my forearm.
The tattoo had been an impulse, though I’d thought about it for months before going through with it. Sophia’s unfinished necklace, inked into my skin exactly as far as her original drawing had gone. The gold work cascading down my arm, building toward a center that would never be filled.
Someone had asked me once why I’d never completed it. Why I’d gotten a tattoo of an unfinished piece instead of imagining what it might have become.
“It wasn’t mine to finish,” I’d said.
It still wasn’t. The answer had to come from her, if it ever came at all.
I closed the journal and put it back in the drawer, next to the others. Next to the note she’d sent after receiving L’Espace, a single line on a card: I understand. Thank you. Next to the wedding ring I’d kept because I couldn’t bear to get rid of it.
The apartment settled into quiet around me. Three years of quiet. Three years of coming home to empty rooms, of sleeping alone, of becoming the man she’d needed when she no longer needed him.
I’d changed everything about my life. I worked reasonable hours, delegated, set boundaries with my parents and kept them. I’d become someone who understood what mattered, who made room for the things he loved, who didn’t sacrifice everything for a company that would survive without him.
But the person I’d changed for was building a life in Florence, happy and thriving and completely beyond my reach.
I traced the unfinished tattoo on my arm and thought about the article. About her smile. About the three years of silence between us, broken only by the occasional practical communication that divorce required.
She’d moved on.
Maybe it was time I accepted that I never would.
My phone buzzed. A text from my mother about Sunday dinner, which I would attend because I’d learned that showing up mattered even when I didn’t feel like it.
I typed a response, set the phone aside, and sat in the green armchair until the lights of Paris began to flicker on outside my window.
Somewhere in Florence, Sophia was living the life she’d chosen.
Somewhere in Paris, I was learning to live with the life I’d lost.
The unfinished necklace on my arm caught the lamplight, gold ink against skin, ending exactly where she’d left it.
Still unfinished.
Still hers.