"You've been somewhere else." Not an accusation. Just a fact.
She looked at him. "I've been watching you work."
Something moved in his face. She had learned to watch for these small movements - they were the closest she usually got to knowing what he was actually feeling.
"Give me ten minutes," he said.
The apartment went quiet.
The caterers left. The lights stayed on but lower, the tree doing its slow warm work in the corner. The city pressed its nose against the glass and breathed its winter breath.
He crossed to her. He took the mostly-full champagne glass from her hand and set it on a side table. He stood in front of her and looked at her in the way that made her feel simultaneously seen and uncertain - the focused attention turned all the way up, no party guests to distribute it among.
"You're exhausted," he said.
"I'm fine."
"You've been going still for the last hour. You go still when you're tired."
He noticed that. Of course he noticed that. He noticed everything.
"I had an early morning," she said.
"You always have an early morning." But there was no criticism in it. He was just noting a fact about her. He did this - catalogued her, added information to whatever internal database he maintained about the people who mattered to him. She had found it unsettling at first and had stopped finding it unsettling and now found it the most specific form of tenderness she had encountered in her adult life.
His hand came up to her face. Just his fingertips. Tracing the line of her jaw.
"I'm here now," he said.
He said things like that. Never I love you - she had been waiting for those words and had stopped counting the times she'd thought they might come. But I'm here now, yes. I came to find you, yes. You look like you need to sleep and I'm going to take care of that, yes. The specific and the concrete. His version of the thing.
She kissed him first. She almost always kissed him first.
He kissed her back with the kind of focus he brought to everything - total, unhurried, his hands in her hair. This was the place she loved most in their relationship, these moments when the controlled precision of him dropped away just slightly and she could feel that he was present, fully present, not calculating or calibrating, just here. With her. She loved him especially fiercely in these moments and was always a little afraid of how much.
They moved through the apartment. He turned the lights down. She went to the bathroom and unzipped her dress in the mirror and looked at her own face - the face of a woman who was doing very well at holding herself together - and thought: Be here. Just be here. The questions can wait.
She turned off the light.
She was here. He was here.
She let herself stop thinking.
She woke at three AM.
Ethan was asleep beside her. He slept the same way he did everything - contained, as though even in sleep he maintained some level of order. She lay watching the ceiling, the faint movement of light from the street below making slow patterns in the dark.
She loved him. She was sure of it in the particular clarity of three in the morning, more sure than she was in daylight hours when she could talk herself into nuance and uncertainty. She loved the way he noticed things. The way he stood in a room. The small smiles that cost him something and the way he gave them anyway, to her. The specific precision of his attention, which was also - she had realized - a kind of care. His version of it.
She was afraid. That was also true, and also specific. She was afraid of the math of it: she was all in, and she did not know where he was.
She turned her head.
The phone on his nightstand lit up.
A notification. A name at the top of the preview screen.
Anna.
Sophia did not reach for it. She had never in her life touched another person's phone without permission - it was a line she had drawn early, and held. The answer to whatever was on that screen would not be worth the feeling of having crossed it.
But she could see the name from where she lay.
Anna.
That was all. Just the name.
The screen went dark.
She lay very still. Her heart was doing something that was not comfortable. She thought: Don't. Don't do this at three in the morning. A text message at three AM means nothing. It could be a work contact. It could be anyone. Anna is not an unusual name.
She thought: Except that you saw his face tonight when that woman crossed the room to him. You saw the ease of it. The familiarity. The closed distance between two people who know each other without trying.
She thought: You don't know that was the same Anna.