Chapter Seven - Charlotte

The call came at eight in the morning, while Sophie was still in Charlotte's robe, standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil and carefully not thinking about Julian Calloway.

Edmund's name on the screen. Charlotte's phone, which Sophie had been carrying for five days now, screening every call with the particular anxiety of someone defusing something that might or might not be live.

She answered before she could talk herself out of it.

"Charlotte." Edmund's voice was warm and brisk in equal measure, the voice of a man who treated every conversation like the opening of a meeting. "I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time. I've asked the hotel to put together a final run-through of the reception arrangements this Thursday, just the four of us — you, Julian, your mother and myself. Small thing, shouldn't take more than two hours. Seven o'clock, the Langham. You'll be there?"

Sophie stared at the kettle.

Two hours. Edmund Calloway, up close, across a table, for two hours. The man had spent one dinner pressing her hand between his and calling her radiant, and she'd survived it, but a dinner was a performance with an audience and movement and noise, the kind of thing you could navigate by staying in constant motion. A meeting was different. A meeting had eye contact and direct questions and the kind of sustained attention that had limits she wasn't sure she'd found yet.

"Of course," she said. "Thursday at seven. We'll be there."

She hung up and put the phone face-down on the counter and stood very still until the kettle screamed.

Julian appeared at the house on Wednesday evening, which she had not expected and which her mother greeted with the enthusiasm of a woman who had decided, without consultation, that Julian Calloway's presence in their home was both a good omen and a structural necessity.

"He's keeping an eye on things," Margaret told Sophie in a low voice, as if Julian weren't three feet away examining a photograph on the mantelpiece. "Let him."

Sophie was not entirely sure whether her mother meant the wedding arrangements or Sophie herself, and did not ask.

They sat together in the drawing room after dinner — her mother retreating diplomatically to bed at half past nine in a move so transparent that Sophie nearly said something — and went through the final seating chart for the reception, Julian with the document on his phone, Sophie with the printed copy that had arrived from the wedding planner that morning. It was, on its surface, entirely practical. In practice, it required them to sit close enough on the sofa that she could feel the warmth off his arm, occasionally leaning over the same page at the same time, and Sophie spent a considerable amount of energy pretending this was unremarkable.

She was not succeeding particularly well.

"My father's business partners are here," Julian said, pointing to a cluster of tables near the front. "Charlotte — you — originally requested they be near the back, on account of the speeches."

"Why the back?"

"Something about one of them having a tendency to heckle at events." He glanced at her sideways. "Charlotte found it funny. Her exact words were that she wanted to watch him get cut off by the microphone."

Sophie thought about that. "That does sound like her, actually."

"Does it." Julian studied her for a moment, the seating chart temporarily abandoned. "You do that sometimes. Separate yourself from her, talk about her in third person. Like you forget you're supposed to be the same person."

Sophie set the printed chart down. "Maybe it's getting harder to pretend we are."

He was quiet for a moment, something shifting behind his eyes. "Edmund called you this morning."

"He told you."

"He mentioned he'd confirmed the Thursday meeting, yes." Julian turned the phone face down on the cushion between them, giving the conversation his full attention. "You don't have to go."

"Of course I do."

"Sophie—"

"If I don't go, he calls again. If I make excuses, he comes here. A man like Edmund doesn't accept vague unavailability from a woman four days before his son's wedding." She looked at Julian squarely. "I'll manage Thursday."

He looked at her the way he'd been looking at her in the gallery, that steady, searching attention that made her feel simultaneously seen and dangerously exposed. "I'll be there," he said. "The whole time. If he asks you anything you don't know, look at me first."

"And if you're not looking back?"

"I'll always be looking back." He said it simply, without drama, the way he said most things that turned out to matter. Then he picked up his phone again, returning to the seating chart, and Sophie made herself do the same, even though her pulse had done something completely unhelpful at the words.

Thursday arrived before Sophie was ready for it.

She spent the afternoon in Charlotte's room, reading through six months of her sister's text messages on the spare phone she'd found in the desk, piecing together the Charlotte who had existed before Sophie stepped into her place. There were texts to friends Sophie barely knew, conversations about things Charlotte had never mentioned — a yoga class she'd been attending for eight months, a book club, a therapist named Dr. Reeves whom she'd been seeing every other Tuesday. A life built in careful increments, away from the family house, away from the wedding plans, away from the version of herself that Margaret and Edmund and the Calloway alliance required her to be.

Sophie set the phone down and sat with that for a while.

She understood it, which was the part that made it complicated. She understood the quiet suffocation of a life arranged around other people's requirements, understood the particular exhaustion of being the version of yourself that rooms expected. She had felt it herself, in smaller ways, for years. She just hadn't built a storage unit full of packed boxes and a cottage on the Yorkshire coast and a false name to escape it with.

She got up, straightened Charlotte's dress in the mirror — deep green silk, the kind of thing Charlotte wore to events like this and Sophie would never have thought to choose for herself — and went downstairs to meet her mother's car.

The Langham was all low light and quiet carpets, the kind of hotel that absorbed sound and trouble in equal measure. Edmund was already at the table when they arrived, Julian beside him, and Sophie was aware the moment she walked in of Julian's eyes finding her across the room — a quick, assessing sweep, checking she was all right, before he rose to greet them.

Edmund kissed her cheek and told her the green was perfect for her. Sophie smiled and said something about the wedding planner's advice, and Edmund laughed, and no one at the table knew it was wrong.

It was the details that nearly undid her, as she'd known they would be. Edmund referred twice to conversations that Charlotte had apparently had with him directly, once about the honeymoon booking and once about an heirloom piece of jewellery intended as a wedding gift from the Calloway side. Sophie navigated the first on instinct and managed the second by deflecting toward her mother, who covered smoothly enough that Sophie almost believed Margaret had done this before.

The third time was the one she didn't see coming.

"You seem different this week," Edmund said, pleasantly, reaching for his wine glass. "Lighter, somehow. More settled." He smiled, the warm, unhurried smile of a man entirely confident in the room he was in. "I said to Julian this morning, whatever the last-minute nerves were about, they seem to have passed."

The table was very quiet for exactly one second.

Julian set down his fork. "She's been sleeping better," he said, without missing a beat. "I think finally getting the seating chart sorted helped."

Margaret made an agreeable sound. Edmund nodded as if this answered everything. Sophie reached for her own wine glass and took a careful sip, aware that her hand was perfectly steady and not entirely sure how.

Under the table, out of sight, Julian's hand found hers — brief, deliberate, and gone again before it could be anything other than what it was. A reminder. A steadying.

I'm here. Look at me if you need to.

Sophie set her glass down. She looked at Edmund and smiled the smile she'd been practicing for a week — the smile that was Charlotte's, that had Charlotte's ease and Charlotte's confidence and none of Sophie's own particular doubt.

"I feel wonderful," she said. "Everything is exactly as it should be."

Edmund beamed. Julian said nothing.

And Sophie, beneath the table, quietly pressed her thumb once against her own palm where the warmth of his hand had been, and held it there until the feeling passed. Which, if she was honest with herself, it never quite did.