CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE **ALEXANDER**

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

**ALEXANDER**

I woke up on her sofa at six to the smell of coffee.

She was already in the kitchen, hair pulled up, moving through her morning routine like I wasn't there, which somehow felt more intimate than if she'd made a production of it. She set a cup on the coffee table without waking me and went back to whatever she was reading on her tablet.

I sat up. "Morning."

"Morning." She didn't look up. "There's eggs if you want them."

Just that. No awkwardness about the night before, no careful management of what it meant that I'd stayed. Just coffee and eggs and her reading in the early morning light.

I made eggs for both of us because she was absorbed in whatever she was reading and I'd learned her well enough to know she'd forget to eat if something held her attention.

She looked up when I set the plate beside her. Something shifted in her expression.

"You cooked," she said.

"Basic self-preservation. You forget to eat when you're reading."

She looked at the plate and then at me. "Thank you."

We ate at the kitchen counter in the early quiet. Outside Seattle was doing its grey March thing, low cloud, soft rain. Inside her apartment was warm and still.

"What were you reading?" I asked.

"Artist statement from the London show opener. He sent a revised draft." She slid the tablet toward me. "Read the third paragraph."

I read it. "He's overexplaining the concept."

"Yes. It undercuts the work." She took the tablet back. "People don't need to be told how to feel. They need to be given space to feel it."

"Tell him that."

"I will. Kindly but directly." She finished her eggs. "You're good at that too. Making space."

I looked at her. "Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation." She met my eyes. "You used to fill every room. Now you know when to be quiet. It's better."

Coming from her, observation carried more weight than compliment. I took it as such.

The London show opened the third week of March.

We flew separately. Her idea, still maintaining the private boundary she'd drawn, which I respected even as the distance felt increasingly unnecessary. She had professional reasons that were real and I understood them.

I went for the hospitality partnership side. Two days of meetings with the venue directors and accommodation contacts I'd arranged. Functional. Separate from her world there.

She texted me the night before the opening. *Nervous.*

I stared at it. Sophia Chen admitting to nervous was not something she offered lightly.

“You've been building to this for two years,” I wrote back. “The work is extraordinary. You know that.”

“Knowing and feeling are different things.”

“Yes. Feel it anyway. It won't stop you.”

A long pause. Then: “Where are you staying?”

I told her. Another pause.

“The venue is three blocks from there.”

“I know.”

“You could come see the setup. Tonight. Before anyone else sees it.”

I was there in twenty minutes.

She met me at the venue's back entrance, still in her travelling clothes, hair loose. The space was partially lit, the installation in its final position, two of her staff making minor adjustments in the far corner.

She watched my face as I walked through it.

I took my time. Moved through the full sequence of work, the photographer's series anchoring one wall, the sculptor I'd heard her talk about for months finally in front of me in three dimensions, the two painters she'd positioned in deliberate conversation across the central space.

It was extraordinary. Not because I'd learned to say so. Because it genuinely was.

I came back to where she was standing. "Sophia."

"Don't be excessive."

"I'm not." I looked at her. "You built something that matters. This is serious work."

She held my gaze for a moment, letting it land rather than deflecting it. "Thank you."

Her staff finished in the corner and said goodnight. We were alone in the lit space with the art and the particular quiet of a room holding its breath before an opening.

She walked to the center and stood looking at the sculptor's largest piece, a tall fractured figure in bronze that caught the light in sections.

I walked up behind her and she leaned back against me, just slightly, her head tilting back against my shoulder.

"I keep thinking my father would have liked this," she said quietly.

I hadn't heard her mention him before. I stayed still and let her have it.

"He was the one who took me to galleries when I was small. Before the family decided art was a hobby and not a direction." She looked at the bronze figure. "In the first life I abandoned it to become a Sterling wife. In this one I built it instead." A pause. "I think he'd have preferred this version."

"I think he'd have preferred you happy," I said. "Which you are."

She turned to look at me. In the low gallery light her eyes were very clear.

"I am," she said, like she was confirming it to herself as much as to me.

I turned her gently by the shoulders and kissed her there in the empty gallery, unhurried, both hands at her face. She came up onto her toes slightly and kissed me back with a warmth that had been building for weeks and was no longer contained by careful management.

When she pulled back her hands were in my jacket and she looked at me with an expression that had no guard left in it.

"Alexander."

"Yes."

"I'm close." She said it quietly, holding my eyes. "To the thing I haven't said yet."

My heart did something inconvenient. "I know."

"I just need you to not do anything that makes me regret getting here."

"I won't."

"Promise me. Not as a formality. Actually mean it."

"I mean it." I held her face. "I will spend whatever time you give me making sure you never regret this."

She studied me for a long moment with those clear eyes that had survived more than anyone should have to.

Then she nodded. Decided.

"Come to the opening tomorrow," she said. "Not as a hospitality partner. As mine."

The word landed in my chest with a weight I felt physically.

"Yes," I said.

"People will see."

"Good."

She laughed softly. "Don't be smug about it."

"I'm not smug. I'm just not pretending anymore."

She straightened my jacket with both hands, the small careful gesture she'd been doing for weeks. Then she stepped back and looked at the gallery with clear satisfied eyes.

"Lock up with me," she said.

We turned off the lights section by section and walked out into the London night together, her shoulder against my arm, the rain fine and cold.

She didn't move away when I took her hand.

She held on instead. Small thing. Everything thing.

I held on back.