30. Sophia
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Sophia
Two weeks of cautious happiness.
That’s what we managed before everything fell apart again.
Alexander flew to Florence twice more, and I went to Paris once, and between the visits we talked every day, building what felt dangerously close to a real relationship.
We hadn’t put a name on it yet. We were still too scared to commit to words like “together” or “us,” still too aware of how badly we’d failed each other the first time.
But it had the shape of a beginning. Good and fragile and worth protecting.
I was curled up on his hotel bed, watching him pack for his morning flight, when I made the mistake of teasing him.
“Remember when you told me you’d been dating other women?”
He paused, a shirt half-folded in his hands. “I remember lying to you about it, yes.”
“I still can’t believe you actually thought I’d buy that.” I stretched, enjoying the pleasant ache in my muscles from the night before. “You adjusted your cuff while you were saying it. I knew immediately.”
“You’ve always been annoyingly perceptive.”
“And you’ve always been a terrible liar.” I watched him resume folding. “Although I never did understand why you picked that particular lie. Of all the things you could have said to hurt me, ‘I’ve been dating’ seems pretty tame.”
Alexander’s hands stilled again. The pause lasted a beat too long.
“Alex?”
“I should have told you this before,” he said, not looking at me.
“Told me what?”
He set down the shirt. Turned to face me. His expression was careful in a way that made my stomach tighten.
“The lie wasn’t random. I didn’t just panic and say the first thing that came to mind.” He rubbed at his jaw. “I saw you with Luca, and you looked happy. Really happy, in a way you hadn’t looked with me in years. And I…”
“You what?”
“I wanted you to feel the same thing I was feeling.” The words came out slowly, like he was pulling them from somewhere deep. “I wanted you to wonder if I’d moved on. I wanted you to imagine me with someone else and feel that same kick in the chest.”
I sat up straighter, the pleasant warmth of the morning evaporating. “You wanted to hurt me.”
“For about five seconds? Yes.” He met my eyes. “Once I realized the lie had made you jealous, a part of me liked it. A selfish, petty part of me was glad you still cared enough to be hurt.”
The confession dropped between us and sat there. I stared at him, trying to reconcile this with the man who’d spent two weeks proving he’d changed.
“Let me make sure I understand this.” My voice came out colder than I intended. “I asked you if you’d been dating. You saw an opportunity to make me feel insecure. And for a few seconds, you actually enjoyed watching me wonder if I meant anything to you anymore.”
“Yes.”
“While we were standing outside that restaurant, while I was trying to figure out if there was any chance left for us, you were getting satisfaction from my pain.”
“For a few seconds. And then I hated myself for it, and I told you the truth.”
“But those few seconds happened.” I pushed off the bed, needing distance. “You watched me hurt, and you liked it.”
“I’m not proud of it, Sophia.”
“That’s not the point.” I grabbed my shirt from the floor, pulling it on with jerky movements.
“The point is that I chose to trust you again. I opened myself back up, I let myself be vulnerable with you, and the whole time you were sitting on this. This piece of you that wanted me to suffer the way you suffered.”
“It was one moment of weakness. One moment that I immediately regretted.”
“But you didn’t tell me about it. You told me you’d lied about the dating, but you didn’t mention the part where you’d deliberately tried to make me jealous. You edited the confession to make yourself look better.”
“I was afraid of exactly this.” He gestured at the space between us. “I was afraid that if I told you the whole truth, you’d leave.”
“So you lied by omission to keep me.”
“I told myself I was protecting what we were building.”
“You were protecting yourself.” I found my jeans, stepped into them. “That’s what you’ve always done. Protect yourself, protect the company, protect whatever feels most important in the moment. And I keep being the thing that gets sacrificed to make room for your comfort.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? Because from where I sit, it looks like you learned nothing.” I turned to face him. “I can’t build another relationship with you on the version of you that enjoyed watching me hurt. I can’t trust someone who admits he wanted to cause me pain, even if it was only for a few seconds.”
“Sophia, please.” He moved toward me. “I’m not that person anymore. That moment at the restaurant, it was a reflex. An ugly, petty reflex from the man I used to be. It doesn’t represent who I’m trying to become.”
“But it’s still in you.” I stepped back, keeping the distance between us. “That impulse to hurt me when you’re feeling hurt. That willingness to make me doubt myself just so you can feel less alone in your pain. I thought we’d moved past that, but apparently it’s just been hiding.”
“Everyone has ugly impulses. What matters is whether we act on them.”
“You did act on it.” The heat rose in my voice before I could stop it. “You lied to make me jealous.”
“And then I told you the truth.”
“After I caught you. After I confronted you outside the restaurant. You didn’t volunteer that confession, Alex. You gave it up because I backed you into a corner.”
He had no response to that. I watched him reach for one and come up with nothing, the realization landing that I was right.
“I’m going to go,” I said.
“Don’t. Please.” He reached for me, then stopped himself. “Don’t leave like this. Let me explain, let me…”
“Let you what? Talk me into feeling better about being deliberately hurt? Convince me that your moment of cruelty was justified because you were in pain?” I shook my head.
“I’ve heard those arguments before. I spent years hearing them.
‘I didn’t mean it. I was stressed. I was hurting.
You should understand because you know how much pressure I’m under. ’”
“This is different.” He stepped toward me, urgent.
“How? How is this different from every other time you hurt me and expected me to forgive you because your intentions weren’t entirely malicious?”
“Because I’m telling you now. Because I’m being honest about the ugliest part of what happened, even though I know it might cost me everything.”
“You’re telling me now because I pushed. Because I made a joke about the lie and you got evasive and I kept asking questions. This isn’t you volunteering information, Alex. This is you getting caught again.”
He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. “I don’t know how to make this right.”
“Neither do I.” I grabbed my bag from the chair. “And that’s the problem. We keep having these moments where I think we’ve finally figured out how to be honest with each other, and then I find out there was another layer you were keeping back.”
“There’s nothing else. I swear to you, there’s nothing else I haven’t told you.”
“I want to believe that.”
“But you don’t.”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.” I moved toward the door. “I need some time.”
“Sophia, wait.”
I stopped, my hand on the handle.
“If you leave now, are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I’ve got.” I turned to look at him. “You hurt me, Alex. Not in the big, dramatic ways you hurt me during our marriage. Just a small, petty cruelty that you kept hidden for two weeks while you were sleeping in my bed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know you are. But sorry doesn’t undo the fact that you looked at me in pain and, for a few seconds, you liked it.” I opened the door. “I need to figure out what I do with that.”
I walked out.
He didn’t follow me. Didn’t call after me. Didn’t chase me down the hallway or beg me to stay.
Part of me wanted him to. Part of me wanted the dramatic gesture, the proof that I mattered enough to fight for.
But a bigger part of me recognized that he was doing exactly what I’d asked. Respecting my choice. Giving me space. Being the man he claimed he’d become instead of the man who would have followed me and forced the conversation toward forgiveness before I was ready.
I made it to the street before the tears came.
I’d done this before. Walked away from Alexander, convinced I was making the right choice, unsure whether I’d ever walk back. The first time it had been necessary, an act of survival that saved my life.
This time I didn’t know what it was.
A test, maybe. A breaking point. Maybe the moment where we finally discovered whether the people we’d become could actually build a love that lasted, or whether we were just two broken people making the same mistakes in new configurations.
I hailed a cab and gave the driver my address.
Behind me, the hotel disappeared into the Florence morning.
Ahead of me, nothing but questions I didn’t know how to answer.