CHAPTER TWENTY TWO **SOPHIA**

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

**SOPHIA**

I didn't tell Isabelle immediately.

That lasted exactly forty-eight hours before she showed up at the gallery with lunch and looked at my face and said, "Something happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Sophia."

"We had coffee at my apartment."

She set the lunch down slowly. "And?"

"And I kissed him."

The sound she made brought Yuna out from the back room. Yuna took one look at Isabelle's expression, turned around, and went back without a word. I was going to give her a raise.

"Tell me everything," Isabelle said.

"There's not much to tell. It was one kiss. We talked. He left."

"How was it?"

I picked up my coffee. "Real."

She looked at me with an expression I recognized, the specific Isabelle Laurent combination of delight and protectiveness that she'd been deploying since we were seventeen. "Are you scared?"

"Completely."

"Good." She unwrapped her lunch. "Scared means it matters. You spent five years not letting anything matter."

"Things mattered."

"The gallery mattered. The plan mattered. People were kept at measured distance and you know it." She pointed a fork at me. "He got through."

"Don't make it a bigger thing than it is."

"It kissed him after two lifetimes of history. It's exactly as big as it is."

I couldn't argue with that so I ate my lunch instead.

******

He came by the gallery Wednesday unannounced.

Not the café. The actual gallery, during open hours, which meant he walked in like any visitor and stood in the main hall looking at the current exhibition while I finished a call in my office. Yuna came to tell me and I told her to let him look.

I watched him through the office window for a few minutes without him knowing. He moved through the space the way he had Sunday evening, with genuine attention. Stopped at the same Harlow piece. Then moved to the newer installation we'd hung Tuesday, a photographer I'd signed in year two who was now showing internationally.

He didn't perform interest. He was just interested.

I went out.

"You should have said you were coming," I said.

"I was in the neighborhood." He looked at me. "Also that's not true. I wanted to see you."

"So you came to my workplace unannounced."

"You came to mine. The Tokyo call."

"That was scheduled."

"This is spontaneous. Different approach, same impulse." He held my gaze without apology. "I can leave if it's inconvenient."

I looked at him for a moment. "There's a private viewing room in the back. I have a new artist's pieces that aren't hung yet. Come look at them with me."

He followed me through to the back room, away from the main gallery floor and the two visitors currently moving through it. The viewing room was quiet and well-lit, six large canvases leaning against the walls, a photographer's series I'd been deciding how to sequence for the spring show.

He went through them slowly. I watched his responses rather than the work, which I already knew well.

"This one last," he said, stopping at a wide landscape shot. "It's the resolution. Everything before it is building to this."

I looked at the sequence again through that lens. He was right. I'd been putting it third.

"You have good instincts," I said.

"I have you talking about art for two months. Some of it absorbed."

I moved to stand beside him looking at the landscape. Close enough that our arms were almost touching.

"Alexander."

"Yes."

"Sunday wasn't a one-time thing." I said it to the photograph rather than to him. "I want to be clear about that."

He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Okay."

"But I need it to be private. For now." I turned to look at him. "Not because I'm ashamed of it. Because the trial coverage is still running and the gallery is in a public moment and I need those things to exist separately from this."

"I understand."

"And I need it to be slow."

"Sophia." He turned to face me fully. "I spent the original timeline rushing past everything that mattered because I didn't know how to be still. I'm not rushing anything."

"I know." I held his gaze. "I just needed to say it out loud."

He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, slowly, deliberately. His hand stayed at my jaw for a moment.

"Better?" he said.

"Getting there."

He kissed me this time. Unhurried, one hand cupping my face like I was something he was being careful with. I let myself stay in it longer than Sunday, past the point where I was assessing it and into the place where it was just happening.

When we broke apart I stayed close. His forehead against mine, both of us quiet.

"You're thinking," he said.

"Always."

"What about?"

"That this is the part where it either goes wrong or it doesn't." I pulled back enough to see his face. "And for the first time I genuinely don't know which it'll be."

"Neither do I." He said it without flinching. "That's how I know it's real."

I stepped back and looked at the photographs again, restoring some functional distance.

"Sunday," I said. "Dinner. Not the café."

"Where?"

"My apartment. I'll cook." I glanced at him sideways. "Don't read too much into being fed."

"I'm just a man being offered a meal."

"Exactly."

He smiled. It was different from the Sterling Hotels smile I'd watched him deploy a thousand times in two lifetimes. Smaller, less constructed, entirely his.

I preferred it significantly.

"I should get back," I said.

"I'll leave you to it." He picked up his jacket. At the door he stopped. "The landscape goes last. Trust your first instinct when you look at it fresh tomorrow."

He was right and I already knew it.

"Goodnight, Sterling," I said.

"Goodnight, Sophia."