In Silence, I Loved Him First

Chapter Seven: The Other Phone Call

Sophie's apartment smelled like white flowers and expensive apology — a scent she'd worn since she was nineteen, back when Nathan had still thought it meant something that she'd chosen a perfume specifically because he'd once complimented it.

"You're late," she said, opening the door before he'd even finished knocking, mascara smudged in a way that looked, as it always did, both entirely accidental and somehow perfectly composed.

"You told me it was an emergency."

"It is an emergency." She stepped back to let him in, already turning, already talking, moving with the momentum of a woman who had never once had to ask twice for anyone's attention. "The Hendricks deal fell through. The whole thing. Three months of work, gone, because their board decided we're — and I'm quoting here — 'financially unstable as a partner.'" She said the words like they physically hurt her. "Do you know what that does to us if it gets out? Do you have any idea?"

"I know the company's struggling, Soph. You've said."

"Struggling isn't the word. Struggling is a bad quarter. This is —" She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, breathing hard, and Nathan felt the old, worn reflex kick in before he could stop it, the one that had been trained into him since he was seventeen years old and she'd first learned to cry prettily enough to make the whole world stop what it was doing.

"Hey. Hey, come here." He crossed the room, and she folded into him immediately, easily, the way she always did, like she'd been standing there specifically waiting for the invitation. "It's going to be okay. We'll figure it out."

"Will we?" Her voice was muffled against his shirt. "Because it doesn't feel like it. It feels like I'm drowning, Nathan, and everyone just expects me to keep smiling through it because I'm supposed to be the strong one. Dad's sick. Mom barely leaves her room anymore. It's just me. It's always just me."

"You're not alone."

"Aren't I?" She pulled back to look at him, eyes wet, and there was something underneath the tears that Nathan had never quite let himself examine too closely, something calculating and precise dressed up as vulnerability, though he wouldn't have used either of those words for it even in his own head. "You have her now. Your — wife." The word came out with the faintest, almost

imperceptible edge. "I'm happy for you, truly. But it's not like I can call you at eleven at night the way I used to. You have a whole life now. A whole other person who gets to be your first call."

"You're still my first call, Sophie. Obviously."

"Am I?" She stepped back fully, wiping her face with the back of one hand, composing herself with the speed of someone who had never actually been as undone as she'd appeared thirty seconds earlier. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you've built a very nice little life over there. Grocery shopping. Galas. I saw the photos, you know. You looked happy."

"I am happy," Nathan said, and saying it out loud, in this apartment, to this specific audience, tightened something in him he didn't stop to examine. "That doesn't mean I've forgotten you."

"Prove it." She said it lightly, like a joke, but her eyes weren't joking at all. "Come to the Hendricks gala with me on Friday. Publicly. Let people see the Marvin family standing together, still solid, still worth investing in. It would mean everything right now."

Nathan hesitated. "Friday's the anniversary dinner. The children's literacy foundation Vera started — it's the fifth-year gala. She's been planning it for months."

"So bring her too. Or don't." Sophie shrugged, one shoulder, a small, careless gesture that had never once been careless in her entire life. "I just thought, after everything — after everything I've done for you, Nathan — you might actually show up when I ask."

"That's not fair."

"Isn't it?" Something flashed across her face — quick, sharp, gone before he could name it. "Who got you the Sinclair campaign when your name was radioactive after the scandal? Who spent three weeks convincing every editor in this city to run something, anything, that wasn't about the lawsuit? I did that. Quietly. No credit, no thanks, just because I believed in you when literally no one else would touch your name with a ten-foot pole."

Nathan felt the familiar weight of that debt settle back onto his shoulders, the one Sophie had been carefully, expertly maintaining for over a decade — never quite paid off, always one favor away from even, the exact mathematics of which he'd never once questioned until, very recently, standing in a kitchen four hundred feet from here, someone else had started making him wonder what it might feel like to owe nobody anything at all.

"I'll be there," he said. "Friday. I'll figure out the dinner."

Sophie's whole posture changed, relief and satisfaction blooming across her face so quickly it was almost seamless. "Thank you," she said, softer now, reaching up to straighten his collar with a familiarity that belonged to a version of them that had never actually existed the way she liked to imply it had. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Nathan. I mean that."

He left twenty minutes later, and did not examine, on the drive home, why the compliment stayed with him like something slightly too heavy to carry comfortably.

Vera was still awake when he got in, sitting at the kitchen counter with a mug of tea gone cold beside her laptop, and something in her face — carefully neutral, carefully unreadable — told him she'd clocked the time on the wall clock the second he walked through the door.

"Late night," she said, not a question.

"Sophie had a work crisis. The Hendricks deal collapsed."

"I heard." Vera didn't look up from her screen. "It's been the industry's worst-kept secret for about six hours now."

"You could've mentioned it."

"I could have. I assumed you already knew, given where you were."

There was an edge in it, small but unmistakable, and Nathan felt the tiredness of the last two hours curdle into something closer to irritation. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing." Vera closed her laptop with more force than the moment strictly required, the click of it loud in the quiet kitchen, and busied her hands stacking the mail into a neater pile she didn't actually need neat. "You went to comfort a friend whose company is falling apart. That's not a crime, Nathan."

"You say that like you don't believe it."

"I believe every word of it."

"Then why does it sound like an accusation?"

Vera was quiet for a moment, and Nathan watched her decide something — watched the specific, careful process of a woman weighing a sentence before she let it out of her mouth, a process he'd started, somewhere in the last two months, to recognize as the closest thing to honesty she ever allowed herself in front of him.

"Because I think," she said finally, "that you'd walk through fire for that woman without asking why it's burning, and I don't think you've ever once stopped to wonder whether she'd do the same for you."

The kitchen went very quiet.

"That's not fair," Nathan said, echoing, without meaning to, the exact words he'd said to Sophie an hour earlier — a coincidence that landed somewhere uncomfortable, though he couldn't have said exactly why.

"Maybe not." Vera stood, gathering her mug, her voice perfectly level again, the moment of unguarded honesty closing back over like water. "It's not my business either way. You don't owe me an accounting of your evenings, Mr. Cole. That wasn't in the contract."

"Vera —"

"I'm going to bed." She paused at the edge of the kitchen, not quite looking at him, one hand resting on the doorframe. "There's a plate for you in the fridge, if you're hungry. I made extra."

She'd made extra. Even tonight. Even after sitting alone at that counter for however long, watching the clock, knowing exactly where he'd gone and why — she'd still made him dinner, still left a plate, still done the small, quiet thing she always did without ever once asking to be noticed for it.

"Vera," he said again, softer this time, and she stopped, half-turned, waiting. He didn't have the rest of the sentence ready. He hadn't had it ready in the car either, or on Sophie's doorstep, or at any point over the last two hours, and he stood there now in his own kitchen with the specific, disorienting sense of a man who had just realized, far too late in the conversation, that he'd been arguing the wrong side of something.

"Thank you," he said finally, which wasn't what he meant, wasn't nearly enough, but was the only true thing he could locate in time. "For the plate."

Something flickered across her face — too fast to name, gone before he could try — and for a moment he thought she might say something else, might let whatever was actually sitting behind her eyes come up to the surface where he could see it properly.

She didn't.

"You're welcome," she said instead, and disappeared down the hallway, and Nathan stood alone in the kitchen with a cold plate of food someone had made for him out of habits he didn't yet understand,