The Love He Felt Guilty For

Chapter Five : Professional Distance

The room they'd chosen for the sessions was, Sofia noted the moment she stepped into it, not really a room designed for therapy at all. It was a sunroom at the back of the house, all glass and pale wood, overlooking a garden gone slightly wild in the way that suggested nobody had told the groundskeeper what to do with grief, so he'd simply let the roses grow untended along the back wall instead of asking. Toys were arranged with the studied casualness of a staff member following someone else's instructions — a dollhouse, a basket of art supplies, a low table with two small chairs and one larger one, clearly added for her. There were no photographs anywhere. Not one. In a house this size, in a room meant to help a child grieve her mother, someone had made a decision, consciously or not, to keep Elena Cole entirely out of it.

Sofia filed that away without comment and began, out of long habit, sorting through the art supplies, unhurried, giving the doorway nothing to perform for.

She heard Lily before she saw her — light footsteps pausing twice in the hallway, the rhythm of a child working up courage to cross a threshold she'd been told, however gently, that she had to cross. Sofia didn't turn. Direct eye contact from a stranger at that moment could undo ten minutes of careful groundwork in half a second. She simply held up a crayon and said, to the crayons rather than the door, "I like this blue. Not everybody picks the good ones first."

A long silence. Then the scuff of small sneakers, a few feet into the room, stopping.

Sofia kept sorting, kept naming colors, and let Lily stand there watching for as long as she needed — until the door opened again and Damien walked in, tie loosened like he'd come straight from a call, and every calibrated inch of stillness in the room shifted around him.

Sofia felt it before she understood why — an inconvenient, treacherous lift in her chest, entirely separate from the professional composure she'd spent four days rebuilding. He crossed the room not toward her but toward his daughter, crouching to her eye level with the ease of a man who'd practiced this out of sheer necessity.

"Hey, monkey," he said. "Dr. Reyes is nice. I promise."

Lily looked between her father and the stranger holding the good blue crayon, said nothing — expected, per the file — and then did something the file hadn't prepared Sofia for. She crossed the room, sat down cross-legged directly across from

Sofia, and picked up a green crayon without being asked.

Behind them, Camille made a small sound, something between a gasp and a swallowed sob. Damien's face went very still. Sofia understood she was watching something that hadn't happened in this house in fourteen months.

"That's a good color too," Sofia said, quiet, unhurried. "You can draw with me or on your own. Both are fine."

Lily studied her — the same assessing look Sofia remembered, with an unwelcome jolt, from a stranger at a hotel bar four nights ago, the same habit of measuring a person before trusting them — and then bent over the paper and drew alone, ignoring the question entirely, which was itself an answer.

Sofia let her, sitting back, giving her room, allowing herself for the first time since walking through that iron gate to actually watch the case in front of her instead of the wreckage of her own decisions. Lily drew slowly, with real skill for her age — a house, then two figures beside it, holding hands. She hesitated over a third figure, crayon hovering, then set it down and turned the paper over to start again on the blank side. No house this time. Just two figures holding hands in a wide expanse of white that could have been a field, a beach, nothing at all.

She didn't speak, not once, through the entire forty minutes. But when Sofia said gently that their time was up and she'd love to visit again next week, Lily did something that made Camille cry openly in the doorway: she picked up the drawing, hesitated, and held it out — not to her father, not to her grandmother, but to Sofia.

Sofia took it with the same careful composure she'd held all session, thanked her quietly, said she'd keep it safe. She did not, until she was alone in her car twenty minutes later with the drawing on the passenger seat, let herself feel the full weight of it — a child who hadn't connected with a single specialist in over a year had handed her a drawing on the very first day.

Professionally, it was the best outcome she could have hoped for.

It was also, she understood with a small, sinking feeling, going to make it entirely impossible to walk away from this case — regardless of what staying close to it might eventually cost her.

Damien found her in the front hall afterward, packing her bag with the same unhurried care she'd brought to the whole session.

"That's never happened," he said. "The drawing. She's never given anyone a drawing."

"It's a good sign," Sofia said, careful, even. "I don't want to overstate one session. But it's a good sign."

"Camille's in the kitchen crying happy tears, if you want proof of how big a sign it is."

Something almost like a real smile crossed her face, there and gone. "I'm glad. Genuinely."

They stood a moment in the too-large foyer, the silence stretching in a way that had nothing to do with Lily at all, and Damien felt the pull of the last four days reassert itself — the ease of talking to her, a laugh he still hadn't shaken, standing across from him now in a blazer instead of the dress she'd worn that night, and looking, if anything, more unreachable for the change.

"I want to say something," he said, "once, so we don't have to keep circling it every time we're in a room together."

Sofia went still. "All right."

"What happened between us — I don't regret it. I think pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie, and I don't think either of us is particularly good at those." He watched her face for a reaction, and pressed on anyway. "But my daughter is the only thing in the world that matters more to me than anything else. If you're the person who can reach her — and today makes me think you might be — then whatever we are to each other has to come second. A distant second. I need you to know I understand that."

Sofia held his gaze, grateful, in that moment, for six years of practice at keeping her voice steady when everything underneath it wasn't. "I understand it too," she said. "For what it's worth — I meant what I said in the study. I can keep it separate."

"Can you, though," Damien said — not quite a challenge, quieter than that, almost a question he was asking himself as much as her.

"I have to," Sofia said. "It's not a want. It's the job."

He nodded slowly, and something passed between them that was neither resolved nor entirely honest — an agreement both of them wanted to believe more than either of them actually did. "Same time next week, then," he said.

"Same time next week," Sofia agreed, and let herself out into the long gravel drive, past the untended roses, past the enormous iron gate, telling herself the whole way home that the ache in her chest was only professional investment in a difficult case, and finding, for the second time in four days, that she did not entirely believe herself.