Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Sophie
By the time I arrive at the restaurant the following evening, most of the dinner crowd has already thinned. The hostess leads me through a dimly lit dining room toward a corner booth set apart from the remaining tables, where Julian is waiting with one hand resting beside a glass of amber liquor.
He stands when he sees me. The gesture is simple, but my body remembers the back seat of his car before my mind can interfere. His hand over mine. The warmth of his palm. The way neither of us moved until movement became unavoidable.
“Hi,” I say as I reach the table.
“Hi,” Julian replies.
His eyes travel over me once, slowly enough that I notice and restrained enough that I could pretend I don’t. I slide into the booth before either of us has to acknowledge it.
“You chose somewhere quiet,” I say.
“I thought we’d had enough board members for one trip.”
I smile as he takes the seat across from me.
“I survived.”
“You did more than survive.”
There is something in the way he says it that brings Nathan immediately to mind. Julian crossing the room without any believable reason to do so. The flat look he gave Nathan. His admission in the car that he hadn’t liked the way another man was looking at me.
What unsettles me most is not Julian’s reaction.
It is mine; I liked it. The realization has bothered me since I woke this morning because there is nothing particularly enlightened about enjoying a man’s possessiveness.
I know that. I also know Julian never treated me as though I needed protection, never told me who I could speak to, and never questioned whether I could handle Nathan myself.
He simply wanted the distance between us closed.
Apparently, some reckless part of me liked being the person he crossed the room for.
A server approaches before I can examine the thought any further, and Julian looks toward me.
“Wine?” he asks.
“Yes,” I answer. “Please.”
Julian orders a bottle of Bordeaux, and once the server leaves, I reach automatically for the small notebook inside my handbag.
His gaze drops to it.
“No.”
I stop. “No?”
“You’re not working tonight.”
The corner of my mouth lifts.
“You invited a journalist to dinner and expected her not to ask questions?”
“I expect you to ask questions,” Julian says.
“I’m simply hoping you won’t record the answers.”
“That depends on how interesting you are.”
His eyes settle on mine.
“I’ll take my chances.”
I leave the notebook in my bag. By the time the wine arrives, it becomes obvious that dinner has very little to do with Blackwell Technologies.
Julian doesn’t ask what angle I’m taking with the article or whether I need another interview with engineering.
Instead, after the server pours the wine and leaves us with the menus, he asks where I grew up.
“Outside Philadelphia,” I tell him.
“Suburbs?”
“Mostly. Nothing glamorous.”
“I didn’t ask if it was glamorous.”
“No, but people usually do once Philadelphia comes up. They either imagine Main Line money or Rocky.”
Julian smiles. “Which one were you?”
“Neither. My mother was a teacher. We had a perfectly ordinary house, perfectly ordinary neighbors, and a lawn my mother was forever threatening to pave over because she hated mowing it.”
“Did she?”
“No. She complained about it for twenty years instead.”
His smile deepens. “That sounds more efficient.”
“It was definitely cheaper.”
The server returns for our orders, and the conversation pauses while Julian chooses steak and I order sea bass. When we are alone again, he lifts his glass.
“Brothers or sisters?” Julian asks.
“One younger sister. Emma.”
“You’re close?”
“Not as much as we used to be. She’s in California. She’s annoying, intrusive, judgmental, and would probably donate a kidney before I could finish asking.”
“That sounds close.”
“It is in theory.” I take a sip of wine.
“She’s an ER nurse, so she also thinks everyone else’s work emergencies are imaginary.”
“She may have a point.”
“I’ll make sure she knows you agree with her.”
Julian’s expression warms.
“I already regret taking sides.”
The conversation moves easily, and that alone makes me wary.
I am used to interviews. I am even used to dinners that begin as interviews and loosen after the wine arrives.
This feels different because Julian is not performing curiosity to make himself seem personable.
When he asks something, he listens to the entire answer.
“What about your father?” he asks after I mention my mother again.
My fingers still against the stem of my glass.
There is nothing extraordinary about the question. He has no reason to know the terrain underneath it.
“He left,” I say.
Julian’s expression changes, but he does not interrupt. I look down at the wine for a moment.
“I was six.”
The admission feels strangely exposed despite its simplicity. Most people who know me now know my mother raised us, but I rarely explain why. The details belong to childhood, and I learned a long time ago that repeating them doesn’t alter them.
“He just left?” Julian asks quietly.
“Eventually.” I run my thumb against the base of the glass.
“There were arguments first. A lot of conversations behind closed doors that children supposedly don’t hear. Then one weekend he packed a suitcase and told me he was going away for a little while.”
Julian remains still.
“He came back twice,” I continue.
“Once for a birthday and once around Christmas. After that, there were phone calls. Then fewer phone calls. Eventually my mother stopped pretending she knew when we would hear from him.”
“How old was Emma?”
“Three.”
Julian’s jaw shifts slightly. “That’s young.”
“It was probably easier for her in some ways. She barely remembered what it was like before. I did.”
The server arrives with our meals, creating a natural pause. I am grateful for the interruption until the plates are settled and the server leaves, because Julian still does not rush to fill the quiet.
Most people do. They say they are sorry. They explain that children are resilient. They offer some variation of how everything happens for a reason, as though abandonment becomes noble if you wrap it in enough perspective.
Julian simply looks at me.
“That must have changed the way you trusted people,” he says.
The accuracy of it catches me harder than sympathy would have.
I glance down at my plate. “Probably.”
He waits.
I exhale softly. “Yes. It did.”
Julian gives one slow nod and reaches for his wine. He does not ask me to explain myself further, and somehow that makes me want to.
“My mother never fell apart,” I say.
“At least not where we could see it. She worked, came home, helped us with homework, paid bills at the kitchen table, and figured everything out. Watching her made it difficult to believe there was much value in waiting for someone else to make your life secure.”
“That makes sense.”
“I got very good at being prepared.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I glance at him.
“You say that like it’s a criticism.”
“It isn’t.”
“No?”
“No.” Julian holds my gaze.
“You learned to make yourself difficult to disappoint.”
The words land somewhere deeper than I expect. For once, I don’t have a clever answer ready. I take another sip of wine instead.
When I finally look at him again, the intensity in his eyes has softened but not disappeared.
“What about you?” I ask.
“You’ve spent a lot of time asking about me.”
“I noticed.”
“See? Deflection.”
“I’m not deflecting.”
“You absolutely are.”
His mouth shifts. “What do you want to know?”
“Where did you grow up?”
“Mostly Connecticut.”
“With Adrian?”
“He would’ve been difficult to leave behind.”
I laugh. “You know what I mean.”
“Yes. Adrian and I were together almost constantly.”
“And your parents?”
“My mother was there.”
The specificity of his answer makes me pause.
“And your father?” I ask.
Julian cuts into his steak before answering.
“My father was building Blackwell.”
There is no resentment in his tone, but there is enough precision in the wording that I hear everything he leaves out.
“He worked a lot,” I say.
“He still does.”
“That wasn’t really my question.”
“I know.”
I wait, and Julian’s gaze comes back to mine.
“He loved us,” he says after a moment.
“I’ve never doubted that. But the company was always there. Dinner, vacations, birthdays. There was always a call that mattered or a problem that couldn’t wait.”
“Did you resent him?”
Julian’s eyes narrow slightly with thought.
“Sometimes.”
The answer is so plain that I know he means it.
“And now you run the company.”
“I appreciate the irony.”
I smile. “A little.”
“My mother was different,” Julian continues.
“She made sure Adrian and I had a childhood even when my father was trying to build an empire around us.”
“You’re close to her?”
“Yes.”
There is warmth in the single word that makes me smile.
“Adrian takes after her, doesn’t he?” I ask.
Julian almost laughs. “In temperament?”
“He has enough personality for three people.”
“That would be my mother.”
“And you?”
His eyes meet mine over the rim of his glass.
“What do you think?”
The question feels less innocent than it should.
I let myself study him. His dark jacket is open now, one forearm resting along the edge of the table, his posture relaxed in a way I rarely see. The low restaurant light catches silver at his temples and sharpens the pale blue of his eyes.
“I think you learned how to watch everyone else before deciding how much of yourself to give them.”
His expression stills.
“That sounded suspiciously like analysis,” Julian says.
“You asked.”
“I did.”
“Was I wrong?”
“No.”
The answer comes quietly. Our eyes stay locked longer than the conversation requires. Heat curls low in my stomach, made worse by the wine and the slow certainty that whatever line existed between the assignment and this dinner disappeared sometime before I arrived.
Julian’s gaze drops briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes.
I feel it like contact.
“You’re staring,” I say.
“So are you.”
“I’m a journalist. Observation is part of the job.”
“This isn’t an interview.”