Chapter Four - Deal

Sophie didn't cry in the taxi home, though she came close twice.

She sat with the note folded into a tight square in her coat pocket, Charlotte's handwriting burned into her memory whether she wanted it there or not. *I had no choice. I can't marry a man I don't know.* As if Sophie had a choice now either. As if her sister hadn't simply walked away from the life they shared and handed Sophie the wreckage of it, dressed it up as an apology, and asked her to carry it alone.

It wasn't even the lie that hurt the most. It was the casualness of it — *burn this*, like Sophie was a conspirator in some teenage scheme rather than a woman standing in for her sister at her own wedding, lying to a family, lying to a man who was beginning to look at her like she mattered. Charlotte hadn't asked if Sophie could handle it. She'd simply assumed she would, the way she'd always assumed Sophie would, ever since they were children and Charlotte discovered that her sister's face came with none of the consequences of her own choices.

There had been a hundred small moments like that over the years, Sophie realized now, turning them over one by one as the city slid past the window. Charlotte taking the lead in every room while Sophie hung back. Charlotte assuming, without ever quite saying it, that her sister's life was somehow more flexible, more available to be rearranged around whatever Charlotte needed. Sophie had let it happen for so long that she'd stopped noticing the pattern. It had taken a wedding, a missing sister, and a note slipped under a napkin to finally see the shape of it clearly.

Sophie pressed her palm flat against the window and watched the city blur past, and underneath the hurt, something harder was forming. Resolve, maybe. Or anger dressed up as purpose.

She wasn't going to wait for Charlotte to find a way to reach her properly. She was done waiting.

By six that evening, she'd told her mother she was meeting a friend, taken a taxi to the address printed faintly on the storage unit receipt, and stood in front of a long row of identical metal doors in a low warehouse on the edge of the city, the unmarked key cold in her palm for the second time in two days.

The unit was smaller than she expected. No furniture, no signs of a life being lived — just a dozen cardboard boxes stacked along one wall, each one labeled in Charlotte's quick, slanted handwriting. *Books. Winter clothes. Photographs.* Ordinary things, the kind of things a person packed when they were planning to actually leave somewhere, not simply disappear for a few days.

Sophie knelt and opened the nearest box, sorting through old sweaters and a stack of paperback novels with cracked spines, feeling something tighten in her chest with every layer she uncovered. This wasn't a panic-driven flight. This was a plan, built slowly, over months, hidden from everyone — including, apparently, the sister who was supposed to know her best.

It was the third box that stopped her cold. Beneath a folded quilt, she found a stack of unopened parcels, each one addressed in a shipping label to the same place: a cottage on the Yorkshire coast, a town Sophie had never heard of, care of a name that wasn't Charlotte's. *Eleanor Hart.* Sophie turned the label over in her hands, reading the address three times, as if memorizing it might somehow bring her closer to understanding the sister she apparently no longer knew at all.

Charlotte had built herself an entire other life. A name. A home. Somewhere far enough from London that no one would think to look.

Sophie sat back on her heels, the parcel heavy in her lap, and made a decision that felt both reckless and entirely necessary.

She was going to that cottage. Whatever it took, however long it took to get there without anyone noticing she'd gone, she was going to find her sister and get answers face to face — not through a note slipped under a napkin, not through secondhand apologies. She owed Charlotte nothing less than the truth, and she intended to demand the same in return.

She didn't hear the footsteps until they were already close.

"I followed you," Julian said from the doorway, and Sophie nearly dropped the parcel in her hands.

He stood silhouetted against the dim warehouse light, hands in his pockets, his expression caught somewhere between apology and concern. "Theo called me again. Said you left the restaurant looking like you'd seen a ghost, and when I tried your house, your mother said you were meeting a friend." A faint, humorless smile. "I didn't think friends usually met in storage facilities."

Sophie scrambled to her feet, instinctively shielding the open box behind her, though there was nothing left to hide that mattered more than the truth itself. "You followed me."

"I did." He didn't look ashamed of it. "I've spent two days telling myself I shouldn't care this much about a woman who isn't who she says she is, and apparently I'm done pretending that's working."

He stepped further into the unit, his eyes moving slowly over the boxes, the labels, the careful architecture of a life built in secret. Something in his expression shifted as he took it in — not suspicion this time, but something closer to understanding.

"This is hers," he said quietly. "Charlotte's."

"Yes."

"She's been planning to leave." It wasn't a question. Julian crouched beside the nearest box, lifting the corner of a folded sweater with two fingers, as if confirming something he already suspected. "For a long time, by the look of it."

Sophie hesitated. She wasn't ready to hand him everything — not the name on the parcels, not the cottage she was already planning to find her way to the moment she could slip away unnoticed. But something in his stillness, in the careful way he was piecing the evidence together without judgment, loosened something in her she hadn't expected to give up so easily.

"She left me a note," Sophie said finally. "At the restaurant. A waiter passed it to me."

Julian looked up sharply. "What did it say?"

"That she couldn't marry a man she didn't know." Sophie's voice cracked slightly on the words, the betrayal still raw even as she said them aloud for the first time. "That she had no choice. As if leaving me to clean up after her was somehow not a choice either."

She meant to stop there. She meant to hold the rest of it together the way she'd held everything together for three days — the lying, the fitting, the dinners, the unbearable weight of pretending to be someone whose absence had clearly been planned for months. But something about saying it out loud, finally, to someone who wasn't asking her to perform calm for the sake of appearances, cracked the last of her composure loose.

"She built an entire life without me," Sophie said, and her voice broke properly this time. "A name, a home, boxes and boxes of things she packed in secret, and she never said a word. Not one word, in years, about any of it. I've been standing in for her, lying to everyone who matters to her, and she didn't even trust me enough to tell me she was unhappy."

The tears came before she could stop them, sudden and humiliating, and Sophie pressed the back of her hand to her mouth as if that might hold them in. It didn't.

Julian didn't say anything at first. He simply closed the last of the distance between them and pulled her into his chest, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, the other settling firm and steady against her spine, and Sophie let herself fall into it because she didn't have the strength left to refuse.

"I'm sorry," he murmured against her hair. "For all of it. For the wedding, for your sister, for every version of this that's landed on you instead of her."

She cried longer than she meant to, his shirt damp beneath her cheek, his hand moving in slow, grounding circles against her back until the worst of it passed and her breathing finally evened out. When she pulled back enough to look up at him, they were close enough that she could feel his breath against her mouth, close enough that neither of them moved for a long, charged moment.

His eyes dropped to her lips. Hers did the same. Neither of them closed the distance, though it would have taken nothing at all — a single inch, a single decision — and for a few suspended seconds they simply stayed there, caught in the want neither of them was ready to name.

Julian was the one who finally stepped back, though it visibly cost him something to do it.

"I need to tell you something," he said, his voice rougher than before. "This wedding was never about love, on my end. My father arranged it for the merger between our families' shipping interests. I went along with it because it made business sense, and because I genuinely believed I could build something workable with Charlotte over time." He exhaled slowly. "I should have called it off the moment I started suspecting you weren't her. I should call it off now."

Sophie wiped her face with the back of her hand, steadying herself. "Don't."

"Sophie—"

"I mean it." She made herself meet his eyes properly, even with her face still blotched from crying. "If you call it off, my mother loses everything she's spent a decade building, and your father loses whatever this merger means to him. None of that disappears just because Charlotte ran." She drew a breath. "We carry on. For my mother's sake. For your father's sake. We keep this exactly what it was always supposed to be — business, nothing more — until I find Charlotte and we figure out the rest properly."

Julian studied her for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "And if my father ever found out it wasn't her standing beside me at that altar?"

"Then it has to be a secret," Sophie said quietly. "From your father. If Edmund ever suspected, I don't think either of us could predict what he'd do."

Julian's jaw tightened, but he nodded slowly, some private calculation settling behind his eyes. "All right," he said. "Business. A secret. Whatever you need it to be."

He didn't sound entirely convinced by his own words, and neither, if she was honest, did Sophie.