Chapter Five - Careful

They didn't speak much on the way out of the storage unit.

Julian pulled the metal door closed while Sophie pocketed the key, and they walked back through the narrow warehouse corridor side by side, close enough that their arms brushed twice without either of them acknowledging it. Outside, the evening had settled into the particular grey softness of a London night, the air carrying the smell of rain that hadn't quite arrived yet. Julian flagged down a taxi without being asked, held the door open, and Sophie slid in without thinking — the kind of small, instinctive courtesy she was already beginning to expect from him, which was its own kind of problem.

He didn't get in after her.

"I'll walk," he said, his hand still resting on the open door, his eyes moving over her face with that steady, unhurried attention she was starting to recognize. "Get some rest, Sophie. Tomorrow is going to require a great deal of both of us performing normally."

The taxi pulled away before she could think of anything to say to that.

Her mother was still awake when she got home, sitting in the drawing room with a cup of tea gone cold on the table beside her and the look of a woman who had been rehearsing a conversation for the past three hours.

"How was your friend?" Margaret asked, the words clipped and careful.

Sophie set her bag down and sat across from her. "There's something I need to tell you."

Her mother's face didn't move. "How bad is it?"

"Julian knows I'm not Charlotte." Sophie said it quickly, the way you pulled a plaster off — fast enough that the sting had nowhere to build. "He's known since the first night. And Theo worked it out at lunch today."

The silence that followed was the particular kind that preceded something catastrophic, and Sophie braced for it. Margaret set down her teacup with a precision that suggested she was doing it instead of something else entirely.

"Both of them," her mother said at last. "Both Calloway men know that my daughter has been impersonating her sister at a formal family dinner and at a luncheon and presumably at every other point of contact in the last four days, and you are only telling me this now."

"I know how it sounds."

"It sounds like the entire arrangement is one conversation away from collapse." Margaret pressed two fingers to her temple. "If Edmund finds out—"

"He won't." Sophie leaned forward. "Julian won't tell him. He told me himself — he wants to keep this quiet, for the sake of the merger. He has as much reason to protect this as we do."

"Julian Calloway is not protecting us, Sophie, he is protecting his father's business interests—"

"Which happen to align with ours right now, so it amounts to the same thing." Sophie kept her voice steady, even though her hands weren't. "And Theo isn't going to say anything either. He's been watching this unfold for days and he hasn't moved once. He's loyal to Julian, not to Edmund, and Julian has already asked him to stay quiet."

Her mother was silent for a long moment, her eyes searching Sophie's face with an expression that was something between fear and a question she wasn't quite asking.

"You trust him," Margaret said finally. "Julian."

Sophie opened her mouth to give the practical answer — that trust had nothing to do with it, that it was purely about aligned interests, that she barely knew the man — and found, to her own quiet alarm, that none of those words came out.

"Yes," she said instead. "I do."

Her mother looked at her for another long beat, then picked up her cold teacup and said nothing more. Which was, in its own way, the loudest thing Margaret Ashford had said all evening.

They met the following afternoon at a small gallery in Mayfair — a charity event Sophie had apparently committed to attending as Charlotte weeks earlier, the invitation buried in her sister's diary. Julian was already there when she arrived, standing in front of a large abstract canvas with his hands in his pockets, looking like a man who had genuine opinions about modern art rather than someone killing time.

"You're late," he said, without turning around.

"Charlotte is always five minutes late," Sophie said. "I'm told it's part of her charm."

"Charlotte was twelve minutes late on average." He turned then, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "I started timing it after the fourth occasion."

They moved through the gallery side by side, the easy proximity of two people who had already run out of reasons to maintain formal distance. Sophie found herself noticing small things — the way Julian's hand would settle briefly at the small of her back when they moved through a crowded doorway, warm and there and gone again before she could decide how to feel about it. The way he listened, really listened, without the faintly distracted quality most people wore at events like this.

It was during a quiet moment near the back of the gallery, a glass of wine in hand, that he said it.

"Charlotte used to laugh at everything I said at these things."

Sophie glanced up at him. "That sounds flattering."

"It wasn't. It was reflexive." He tilted his head slightly, studying her. "This laugh — whatever I'd say, whatever anyone said — arrived at exactly the same pitch and duration every time. Like a sound effect." He paused. "You haven't done it once today."

"Maybe I don't find you as charming as she did."

"Maybe," he said, and he was smiling now, properly, which was different from the almost-smiles she'd catalogued so far. "Or maybe you only laugh when something is actually funny. Which, for what it's worth, I find considerably more interesting."

Sophie looked away before she could help it, warmth climbing her neck in a way that had nothing to do with the gallery's temperature.

She was already bracing for him to let it pass when she felt his hand — light, unhurried — brush her cheek. She went very still.

"You have something," he said quietly. "Just there."

He was close enough that she could see the slight crease at the corner of his eyes, close enough that the gesture, which was objectively nothing, felt like considerably more than nothing. Whatever he removed from her cheek she neither noticed nor cared about, because her entire nervous system had reduced itself to the point where his thumb had rested against her skin for precisely two seconds.

When she finally found the nerve to look back at him, Julian was watching her with an expression she was learning to recognize — that steady, unhurried want, held carefully in place, pressed behind composure like something behind glass.

"You blush," he said softly. "Charlotte never did."

Sophie did not dignify that with a response. She turned back toward the nearest painting, heart drumming, and spent the next ten minutes convincing herself she was looking at the art.

She couldn't sleep.

Sophie lay in the dark of her own room, staring at the ceiling, replaying the afternoon in a loop she couldn't find the switch to turn off. The gallery. The laugh. The two seconds his thumb had rested against her cheek like it was the most natural thing in the world. The way he'd said you blush in that quiet, private voice, as if it were something he was keeping just for himself.

She turned onto her side and pulled the duvet up.

It was business. She'd said it herself, in the storage unit, with her face still blotched from crying — business, nothing more, a secret kept from both their fathers until Charlotte could be found and the whole impossible situation untangled properly.

She'd meant it when she said it. She still meant it.

She turned onto her other side.

He'd said he wasn't convinced. She hadn't been either, but that was just the weight of the moment, the tears and the proximity and the particular vulnerability of being seen clearly for the first time in a week. That was all it was. She didn't like him. She didn't know him well enough to like him. She knew his coffee order and the fact that he timed Charlotte's lateness and the way his hand felt at the small of her back, and none of that was enough to constitute anything except a series of observations about a man she was temporarily pretending to be engaged to.

She pulled the pillow over her face.

He was going to be her brother-in-law, potentially, if Charlotte ever came home and decided to go through with any of this. He was her sister's fiancé. He was the son of a man her mother needed, the heir to an empire that had nothing to do with Sophie's life or Sophie's choices, and in approximately seven days she was going to walk down an aisle in a dress that didn't belong to her and stand beside him and promise things she had no right to promise.

Business. Nothing more.

She kept her eyes closed and held onto the thought until, sometime around two in the morning, sleep finally arrived and made the decision for her.