News had reached her a few days before that Maria was pregnant. She'd absorbed the information in an abstract way, and in truth, it didn't hurt as much as it might have done. Her marriage to Dan felt like a lifetime ago, yesterday’s chip paper already. He crossed Sophie's mind far less than he would probably have liked to think, but the fact was that she'd been letting go of him little by little for a long time because he'd been subtly detaching himself for years. She could see that clearly now, but it had taken the arrival of Lucien Knight in her life to make her take off her rose tinted glasses.
Lucien's arrival had made Sophie realise many things.
He'd made her see that she'd been living on the edges of life, existing rather than embracing its bountiful richness in technicolour. He'd plunged her head first into a storm of sensations and emotions; a mental shedding of an old, dull skin; a seductive invitation. 'Hello, come with me, let me shown you somewhere bigger, more dazzling, more truly alive.'
Sophie glanced from the jingling TV ad to her unadorned living room. It couldn't be less dazzling or alive. Two weeks had passed since Lucien had left her home, and she'd barely left it herself since either.
They'd had no contact.
Two weeks felt like forever without him.
She'd laid her heart on the line, and he'd walked away. She shouldn't have been surprised, but she was. Surprised, and hurt, and desolate. She veered between wanting to run to him and wanting to run far, far away, but when she imagined running the only place she imaged running to was Norway, and to Lucien. All of her thought processes seemed to short circuit back to him, to blissful memories he'd created.
Yes. She'd well and truly closed the door on her feelings for Dan. She couldn't fathom how she'd ever been deeply happy with him now that she knew how much more her heart was capable of feeling. And how carelessly he'd treated her. How little she must have known him. As love went, she'd been swimming in the shallow end all those years and she hadn't even known it. Loving Lucien had thrown her out into deep, bottomless oceans where she was constantly swimming against the tide.
Don't love me. I love you. Don't love me. I love you.
It was utterly draining and her body and heart ached with the effort.
She didn't know what she'd actually expected him to say. He wasn't a man she could ever imagine settling down, yet she'd thrown her heart at him anyway. Lucien wasn't an everyday sort of man with an everyday sort of life. Even Sophie could see that the life he'd built for himself didn't include space for a wife.
What did she want him to do? Invest in a pipe and slippers, come home to her in the evenings and grumble about his day at work whilst idly surfing through the TV channels? The idea was hideous, and utterly implausible.
But what was the alternative? Live Lucien's lifestyle at breakneck speed, twenty-four seven? She'd tried it for just a week and come home shattered in mind and body. It was entirely alien to everything she knew as normal, and impossible to imagine sustaining. So where did that leave them? He didn't fit in her world, and she didn't fit in his. Maybe he was right after all. They were too incompatible, in experience as well as outlook. It could never have worked.
And so it was time to make some choices.
She was on the right side of thirty, she was separated, and she was alone.
Sophie was down, certainly, but somewhere deep inside her, she wasn't ready to be counted out. So much had happened over the preceding months. Huge, life-changing events that couldn't help but change people caught up in them too. Sophie's life had always been defined by the people in it. She was a daughter; she was a wife. She'd passed from her family home to her marital one without pause, her life shaped around those she loved.
This time was different. She couldn't shape her life around the person she loved, because he'd promised not to love her back.
But Lucien had taught her other things too. He'd taught her self-respect. He'd given her confidence she didn't know she possessed, and he'd taught her that she didn't have to take anyone else's crap. And finally, finally, Sophie realised that by sitting here alone in her bleak living room, that that was exactly what she was doing. She was taking his crap.
Little by little, she could feel herself rising. She'd hit the bottom, it was time to kick her feet hard and push herself back up to the surface.
Lucien Knight was a walking, talking hang up, a beautiful mass of contradictions. He'd been single-minded in his mission to free her from her marriage and it was time to return the favour. There was something fundamentally wrong with his way of thinking, and one way or another she was going to find out why, and then she was going to put that man straight once and for all.
A few hours later, Sophie walked purposefully through the glass atrium of Knight Inc., her heels clacking on the marble floor and her ponytail swishing with efficiency. No one stopped her. She was a familiar enough face not to raise any eyebrows, and the confidence of her stride implied that she belonged there.
Butterflies filled her stomach as she rode the elevator to the top floor; she was going to see Lucien again. It was only as she approached his resolutely closed door that her nerve wavered for the briefest of seconds, but she thrust the feeling away ruthlessly and tapped her knuckles lightly against the smooth beech wood.
The silence that followed seemed to drag on endlessly, so she knocked again, a little louder this time. When there was still no reply, she turned the handle and pushed it open. Empty. Disappointment spiked hard through Sophie's chest at the overwhelming anti-climax. She'd worked herself up to a boiling point of focus and clarity as she'd prepared to face Lucien, and being faced with his empty desk instead was crushing.
"Sophie?"
Sophie turned at the sound of a female voice and found Kate, one of the girls from the reception desk, behind her.
"Kate, hi," she said, trying to disguise her lacklustre tone.
"It's good to see you back. Are you feeling better?"
"Um, yes... thank you." Sophie smiled carefully as her mind played catch up. She wondered exactly what Lucien had told his staff about her sudden departure. She added the snippet to her list of questions, if she ever caught up with him.
"I was looking for Lucien?"
Kate's eyes widened. "Oh... of course, you won't have heard." She arranged her features into a sorrowful expression and pure fear threatened to take Sophie's legs from beneath her. Oh God. Had something happened to him?
"He isn't around at the moment, he's back in Norway." Kate glanced behind her, and then leaned in a little for confidentiality. "Family troubles. I've been filling in for you while you've been ill. I opened an email... from his father's solicitor I think?" She shrugged defensively at Sophie's frown. "It was an accident. Anyway, seems his dad's in hospital." She lowered her voice to a theatrical whisper. "Pneumonia. Alcoholic, apparently."