29. Alexander
— ? —
Alexander
Half a month after Florence, Sophia turned up at my hotel with a proposition.
“I have a free weekend,” she said, standing in my doorway with a bag over her shoulder. “And you said you were coming back to Florence. So here I am.”
“Here you are.”
“Don’t make it weird, Alex.”
“I’m not making it weird. I’m just surprised. You usually need more advance notice before you commit to anything.”
“Maybe I’m learning to be spontaneous.” She walked past me into the room, dropping her bag on the chair by the window. “Or maybe I just missed you and didn’t want to wait another two weeks to do anything about it.”
“I like option two better.”
“I thought you might.”
We’d been talking every day since the kiss.
Phone calls that lasted hours, texts that arrived at random moments, the slow rebuilding of an intimacy we’d both thought was lost forever.
But this was the first time she’d shown up unannounced, the first time she’d admitted to missing me in a way that required action rather than words.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand. I glanced at it automatically, saw the Whitmore Maison logo, and reached to silence it.
“You can answer that if you need to,” Sophia said. She was standing by the window now, her back to me, her posture carefully neutral. “I know how work is.”
“Work can wait.”
“Alexander, seriously. If it’s important…”
“Nothing is more important than this weekend.” I crossed the room to stand behind her. “I told them I was unavailable. Whatever it is, someone else can handle it.”
She didn’t turn around. “You used to say that, and then you’d answer anyway.”
“I know.”
“You’d promise you’d be quick, and then the call would turn into a meeting, and the meeting would turn into a flight back to Paris, and I’d be sitting alone in whatever restaurant we’d chosen wondering why I kept believing you.”
“I know.” I put my hands on her shoulders, felt the tension coiled beneath her skin. “That’s why I’m not answering. Because I spent years teaching you not to believe me, and the only way to undo that is to prove I’ve changed.”
“And if it’s actually urgent?”
“Then they’ll figure it out without me.” I turned her gently to face me. “I used to think I was indispensable. Turned out the company runs just fine when I’m not there. Better, sometimes. It only needed me to be everywhere all the time because I’d trained everyone to expect it.”
Her eyes searched my face. “You really believe that.”
“I really do.”
“What changed?”
“I lost you.” The words came out simple and honest. “I had to figure out why, and part of figuring it out was realizing I’d made Whitmore Maison into a jealous mistress. Every time I chose work over you, I was telling you that you mattered less. And eventually you believed me.”
“I did believe you.”
“I know. That’s the part I can never undo. But I can show you it’s different now.” I cupped her face in my hands. “I can answer every call, or I can stay here with you. Those are the only options. And I’m choosing you.”
Her eyes went bright with tears she was clearly fighting. “What I said at dinner is still true. You make staying look easy now, and I don’t know what to do with that.”
“It is easy. It was always easy. I was just too stupid to realize it.”
“Don’t call yourself stupid.”
“I’ll call myself accurate.”
She laughed, the sound wet and uneven. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m trying to be possible. For you. For us.” I brushed my thumbs across her cheekbones. “Is that okay?”
“It’s more than okay.” She leaned into my touch. “It’s everything I used to beg for, and you’re just… giving it to me. Like it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s what you deserved all along.”
“Then why wasn’t I worth it before?” The question came out raw, the wound beneath it still bleeding after all these years. “If it’s so easy now, why couldn’t you do it then?”
“Because I didn’t understand what I was asking you to give up.
Because I thought love was enough to make up for everything else.
Because I’d learned from my parents that marriage meant sacrifice, and I assumed you’d keep sacrificing indefinitely.
” I let my hands drop to her shoulders. “The cruelest part is that you would have. You would have kept choosing me, kept waiting, kept making yourself smaller to fit into my life. And I would have let you, because I didn’t know how to see what it was costing you. ”
“And now?”
“Now I hate the man I was. I look back at the way I treated you, the way I prioritized everything over our marriage, and I don’t recognize myself.
” My voice cracked slightly. “You think watching you fall for the man I became doesn’t make me hate the man I was?
You think I don’t lie awake wondering how I could have been so blind, so selfish, so completely certain I was doing the right thing while I destroyed everything that mattered? ”
Sophia was crying now, tears breaking loose faster than she could stop them. “Sometimes I wish you hadn’t changed.”
“What?”
“Because then I could stop wondering whether leaving you was a mistake.” She wiped at her face.
“If you were still the same man, I could tell myself I made the right choice. But you’re not.
You’re everything I begged for, and you became that person after I left, and I don’t know how to forgive myself for not staying long enough to see it happen. ”
“Don’t.” I took her hands in mine. “Don’t rewrite the past to make yourself the villain.
Leaving me was the first time you chose yourself.
You’d spent years putting my needs first, my career first, my family’s expectations first. Walking away was the bravest thing you ever did, and I needed you to do it.
I needed to lose you before I understood how badly I was asking you to lose yourself. ”
“But if I’d stayed…”
“If you’d stayed, I never would have changed.
I would have kept taking you for granted because you kept letting me.
You leaving was the wake-up call I needed.
It was the only thing that could have broken through my certainty that I knew what I was doing.
” I squeezed her hands. “I’m not grateful you left.
I’m grateful you survived leaving. I’m grateful you built a life without me, because it meant you were still here when I finally figured out how to deserve you. ”
She pulled away, stepping back, her arms wrapping around herself in a gesture of self-protection I recognized from our marriage. “I need to think.”
“Okay.”
“I might need to be alone for a while.”
“Okay.” I said it evenly, but my hand tightened where it rested against her back.
“Stop agreeing with everything I say.” The words cracked out of her before she could soften them.
“I’ll agree with whatever you need. Take the time you need. I’ll be here.”
She looked at me, her expression torn between gratitude and frustration. “You’re being very reasonable about this.”
“I’ve had three years of practice at letting you make your own choices.”
“What if I choose to leave?”
“Then I’ll respect that. It’ll break my heart, but I’ll respect it.
” I made myself stay where I was, fighting every instinct to close the distance between us.
“I’m not going to beg you to stay, Sophia.
I’m not going to guilt you into wanting a future you’re not sure about.
If being with me makes you doubt yourself, then maybe you shouldn’t be with me. ”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Then tell me what you are saying. Because I’m trying to understand, and I don’t want to assume I know what you need.”
She didn’t answer at first. When she finally spoke, the words came out hushed, almost private.
“I survived losing you once. I don’t know if I can survive choosing you and finding out I was wrong again.”
The admission gutted me. I understood exactly what she meant, the terror of opening yourself up to someone who’d already proved they could hurt you, the risk of trusting someone who’d broken your trust before.
“I can’t promise I’ll never hurt you again,” I said. “I can’t promise I’ve figured everything out or that I’ll never disappoint you. But I can promise I’ll try. Every day, for as long as you let me, I’ll try to be the man you deserved all along.”
“That’s not enough.”
“I know.” I didn’t flinch from it, didn’t reach for an excuse, just held her gaze and took the hit.
“Promises don’t fix anything. You’ve made promises before.”
“I know.” And that was the worst part, that I did know, that we both did.
“So what’s different now?”
“Nothing I can prove with words.” I moved toward the door, toward my bag sitting by the entrance.
“If you need me to go, I’ll go. If fear means you need space, I’ll give you space.
The only thing I won’t do is make this decision for you.
You’ve spent enough of your life having other people decide what’s best for you. ”
I reached for my bag.
“Stop.”
I turned. Sophia was standing in the middle of the room, her arms still wrapped around herself, tears still wet on her cheeks.
“I don’t want our old marriage back,” she said. “I don’t want to be the woman who disappeared inside your life, who made herself smaller and quieter and less demanding just to keep you.”
“I don’t want that either.”
“And I’m not ready to promise you anything. I don’t know what this is or what it’s going to become. I don’t know if we can build a better version of us or if we’re just going to hurt each other all over again.”
“Neither do I.”
“But I want you.” The words came out broken, like she was admitting a defeat. “I hate that I still do, after everything. I hate that three years apart didn’t kill this, didn’t make me stop wanting you. I want you, Alex, and wanting you again terrifies me.”
“Why does it terrify you?” I asked. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Because I already know I can survive losing you.” Her voice cracked. “What I don’t know is whether I can survive choosing you and being wrong.”
“And if you’re right?”