Chapter Eighteen
Choose You
Paris is easy to get lost in. That's partly why I'd wanted to come.
I moved through the first two days on professional autopilot — meetings, fittings, the particular focused energy of an industry week that demanded presence. I was present. I was professional.
I was also carrying an airport around inside my chest.
The third day, my studio manager Ji-woo called with a question about our three new interns — the ones who'd started a month ago through a design scholarship program.
"The Bennett Initiative placement?" I said.
"Yes. Do you want to sign off on their project assignments, or should I—"
I stopped walking. "What's the Bennett Initiative?"
A pause. "The scholarship program. The one funding the interns. It's been running for — I thought you knew? Six months now."
Six months.
I was in the middle of a Paris side street when I called Lily.
"The Bennett Initiative," I said when she answered. "Who set it up?"
A long pause. "Sophia—"
"Lily."
"It's anonymously funded through a trust. I didn't ask questions because the money was legitimate and the candidates were excellent."
"Find out."
She called back in twenty minutes.
I already knew before she said it. Some part of me had known the moment Ji-woo said six months.
Six months ago, I was still sleeping under the same roof as a man who'd told me on our first meeting that he didn't do feelings.
I called Daniel, Lucas's driver.
"The night I had a fever," I said. "The meeting he canceled. What was it?"
A pause. "Miss Sophia, I'm not sure I should—"
"Please."
A longer pause. "The Singapore acquisition. Thirty million dollar window. It closed without Lancaster Group."
Thirty million dollars.
He'd sat in a chair and watched me sleep through a fever and called it unimportant.
I thought about every cold evening he'd been waiting when I came home late. Every time he'd deflected a journalist's pointed question with phrasing that placed me not beside him but with him, differently. The acquisition offer — the one that was so fair it was almost a gift. His hand in mine in the lobby, three seconds too long.
He'd been telling me.
For months, in every language except the one that terrified him, he'd been telling me.
I stood in Paris and looked at the sky and thought about a man standing in a terminal watching a jetway long after the plane had pushed back.
I opened my laptop and booked the first available flight home.
Then I went back to my hotel and packed faster than I'd packed in my life.
This time I was the one running toward something.
