CHAPTER EIGHTEEN *SOPHIA*

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

*SOPHIA*

Vivian Cross was exactly as I remembered her.

Precise posture, expensive coat, recorder placed on the table before she'd fully sat down. She had the particular energy of someone who'd built a career on being the smartest observer in any room and knew it.

I let her set up without rushing her. We were at a neutral café, not the gallery, not anywhere that was mine. I'd chosen that deliberately.

"Thank you for meeting me," she said.

"You said off the record."

"The recorder is habit. I won't turn it on without your permission." She left it sitting there anyway, which told me everything about how she operated. The reminder of its existence was its own kind of pressure.

I moved it to the side of the table. "Talk to me first. Then we decide if there's a story."

She accepted that without blinking. "I've been following your career since the Harlow acquisition. Before that, honestly, since the Morningstar Gallery opening." She folded her hands. "When I wrote those pieces last year I was working from incomplete information and a narrative that certain people were feeding me."

"Which people?"

"Victoria Ashford's publicist was a source. So was someone in Catherine Chen's office." She said it plainly, no visible guilt. "I didn't fabricate anything. But I framed what I had in the direction my sources pointed me."

"And now?"

"Now Victoria is facing civil penalties and Catherine Chen is on trial. The sources have credibility problems." She looked at me evenly. "And you're a more interesting story than the one I wrote."

"Define interesting."

"A woman who built a gallery empire in two years from nothing. Who had inexplicable market knowledge. Who survived a month in psychiatric detention and came out with her business intact and her enemies in court." She paused. "The public version of that story is impressive. I think the real version is something else entirely."

I studied her. "What do you think the real version is?"

"I don't know. That's why I'm here." She leaned forward slightly. "I'm not asking you to confirm anything supernatural. I'm asking you to tell me who you actually are, what you actually built, and why the people trying to discredit you are the same people currently under federal investigation."

I took a long moment.

In the first life, Vivian had written three pieces about my marriage. Two were thinly veiled observations about my inadequacy as a Sterling wife. One, the last one, published two weeks before the accident, had been almost sympathetic. Like she'd finally looked properly and didn't entirely like what she saw.

She'd been too late then.

"If I do this," I said, "I control nothing about the framing. That's your job and I understand that. But I will correct factual errors directly and you'll run those corrections."

"Agreed."

"And nothing about the trial. Nothing that could affect proceedings or give Catherine's team material to work with."

"Also agreed."

"Then come to the gallery Thursday. I'll show you what I've built and we'll talk." I picked up my coffee. "Not the supernatural version. Just the real one."

"That's enough," she said.

I believed her. Not completely. But enough.

---

Thursday, Vivian arrived at the gallery at two and spent four hours moving through it properly.

I watched her look at things the way she looked at people, with that precise cataloguing attention that missed very little. She asked smart questions about the curatorial choices, the acquisition strategy, the international touring model. Yuna fielded the technical questions with a confidence that made me glad I'd trusted David's instincts on the hire.

In my office at the end, Vivian sat with a full notepad and the recorder off.

"You knew," she said.

"Knew what?"

"Which artists would break. Which acquisitions would triple in value. Which galleries would fold and which would expand." She looked at her notes. "The Tanaka collection, the Harlow estate pieces, the three emerging artists you signed in year one who are now showing at major institutions. The success rate is statistically improbable."

"Good instincts and thorough research."

"Is that the answer you're giving me?"

"It's the answer that's printable."

She smiled slightly. First genuine expression since she'd arrived. "Fair enough." She clicked her pen closed. "I'll tell you what I see. A woman who came from old money, walked away from a conventional path, and built something real without anyone's help. Who got attacked legally and professionally by people with more resources, and is still standing." She looked up. "That's the story I want to write. Whether or not there's a stranger one underneath."

"Write that one," I said. "It's true."

"It is." She stood, gathered her things. At the door she paused. "The articles I wrote before. I am sorry for the framing. I didn't have the full picture but I should have looked harder before I published."

It was the most direct accountability I'd heard from anyone in either timeline who hadn't been legally compelled to offer it.

"Write the piece well," I said. "That's enough."

After she left, I stood alone in the gallery for a while. December light coming through the skylights, the Harlow pieces quiet in the east wing, Yuna working somewhere in the back.

I pulled out my phone and almost called Alexander.

Stopped.

Put the phone down and sat with why I'd reached for it. Not for advice this time. Not to report something. Just to tell him how the Vivian meeting had gone because he'd asked about it last Saturday and I'd wanted to tell him since it ended.

That was different from everything before it.

I picked the phone back up and typed: Vivian meeting went well. Story is moving forward. Thought you'd want to know.

He replied in four minutes. Good. How do you feel about it?

Not whether it was strategically sound. Not what it meant for the trial. How did I feel.

I stared at that for a long moment.

Relieved, I typed. Turns out I wanted the real version of the story told.

Makes sense, he wrote back. You built something real.

Simple. No performance in it.

I set my phone down and looked at the gallery around me, this thing I'd constructed from grief and fury and knowledge I shouldn't have had, that had somewhere along the way become something I genuinely loved.

The revenge had been the architecture. But the building itself was mine.

That distinction mattered.

I hadn't let myself feel it fully until right now, standing in the December quiet with a message on my phone from a man I was slowly, carefully, against every instinct I'd developed across two lifetimes, beginning to trust.

Not there yet.

But the distance was closing in a way I'd stopped pretending I didn't notice. I turned off the gallery lights and went home.