All Chapters of Claimed by his obsession : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Sophia's POVWe flew home on Sunday afternoon.The Edinburgh sky was doing something dramatic with clouds when we left, grey and layered and the kind of beautiful that didn't try to be. I watched it through the plane window until it disappeared and then I turned back to Damien who was reading the structural engineering book with the focused attention he gave things he actually cared about.He had dog-eared three pages.Damien Black who organised everything and kept his desk at specific angles and had opinions about coasters had dog-eared pages in a sixty year old book because he wanted to find them again quickly.I filed that away with everything else.The flight landed at four. By the time we got through the airport it was nearly five and the city was doing the Sunday evening thing, quieter than the rest of the week, amber light on everything.Damien drove.I watched the city come back around us and felt something I hadn't expected. Not dread exactly. Not the tension of returning to

Sophia's POVTuesday Mei came back from Portugal.She arrived at the estate at eleven in the morning with a large bag, a smaller bag, and a paper sack that smelled like something baked that morning which was impossible given she had been on a plane for three hours but Mei operated outside of normal constraints.She put the paper sack on the kitchen counter and looked at me."Pastries," she said. "From the bakery near the village. I bought enough for everyone and told them to freeze what they didn't eat immediately.""How did you keep them fresh on the plane," I said."I told the flight attendant they were medication," she said.I stared at her."They're technically therapeutic," she said. "Sit down."I sat down.She put a pastry in front of me and sat across from me and looked at me with my mother's eyes the way she did when she had something to say that required the right moment.I ate the pastry. It was extraordinary. Flaky and warm and tasting like somewhere I had never been but ap

Damien's POVMonday was the first normal Monday in a long time.Not absence of problems. Just absence of emergencies. The distinction mattered more than it used to.I was at my desk by seven. The BCT quarterly review needed finalising. Three emails from board members required responses that were direct without being pointed. A development team in the tech wing had hit a problem they needed me to look at personally.Normal things. The kind that made a company run rather than the kind that threatened to end it.I worked through them steadily.At eight Sophia appeared with coffee and her laptop and settled into the chair across from me which had become her chair in the specific way that things became yours when you used them consistently and nobody objected.We worked in the same quiet for an hour.At nine she said "they responded."I looked up.She was looking at her screen with an expression I couldn't fully read from across the desk. Not bad. Not simple."The funding body," she said.

Damien's POVOn Wednesday, I visited the aerospace consulting office for the first time.Not a big thing. Just a meeting. An introduction to the team, a review of the current projects they wanted an external perspective on, a conversation about what the partnership would look like in practice.I wore the hoodie.Not because Sophia had told me to. Because I wanted to and because it turned out that was the same thing now.The office was in a different part of the city to everything else I did. Smaller building. The kind of place that prioritized function over impression, whiteboards everywhere, models on shelves, the particular productive disorder of people who cared more about the work than how the work looked from outside.I stood in the doorway for a moment.It felt like the bookshop in Edinburgh. A different kind of organized chaos. The kind that made sense once you understood what it was organizing around.The lead researcher was a woman named Dr. Park, no relation to anyone in our

Damien's POVSaturday morning Dominic asked me to go for a walk.Not a meeting. Not a conversation that required a room and a closed door. Just a walk, which from Dominic was its own kind of statement because Dominic didn't do things without purpose and a walk was a particular kind of purpose.We went out through the estate gates and into the city at nine in the morning when it was still mostly to itself, the weekend quiet, fewer people moving with the particular urgency of somewhere to be.We walked for a while without talking.This was fine. Dominic and I had always had a specific kind of silence between us that wasn't uncomfortable, the silence of two people who had spent enough time together that presence didn't require noise.At some point he said "the aerospace consulting.""Yes," I said."How is it," he said."Good," I said. "Dr Park is direct. The team knows what they're doing. The problems are interesting.""You came back different on Wednesday," he said."Different how," I s