The first thing Sophia noticed about Ethan Cole's Christmas Eve party was that she didn't belong there.
Not in the way that she'd been invited by accident - she had been invited deliberately, had spent eight months sleeping in his bed and wearing his ring and learning the sound of his name in her own voice. No, she belonged there in all the technical senses. But the party made it very clear, without saying a word, that there was a difference between belonging and fitting.
Cole's penthouse occupied the top floor of a pre-war building on East 73rd Street, between Madison and Park. The views were the kind that made you stop mid-sentence. Central Park below, white with fresh snow, the city spreading out in every direction in its particular December glitter. Inside: exposed brick softened by candlelight, a Christmas tree that must have been eleven feet tall, and a hundred guests who all seemed to know each other in ways Sophia had not yet learned.
She circulated. That was the word for it - she circulated, holding a glass of champagne she barely touched, nodding when she should nod, smiling when she was smiled at. A woman in emerald green asked what she did. Sophia said she was an illustrator. The woman said how lovely and turned to the man beside her to ask him something about the Cayman Islands.
Sophia went to stand by the window.
From here she could watch Ethan without being obvious about it.
He was in the center of the room - he was always in the center of the room, not because he positioned himself there but because rooms organized themselves around him. Tall, dark-haired, with the controlled bearing of a man who had been handsome for long enough that it was simply part of his operating system. He was talking to three men she didn't recognize, his expression attentive and completely unreadable. Not warm, not cold. Just precise.
She knew that expression. She had been trying to read through it for ten months.
They had met in February, at a gallery opening in Chelsea that Sophia had been hired to illustrate for. She'd been standing in front of her own work - a series of botanical prints she'd done in ink and watercolor, commissioned for the launch of a new skincare line - when a voice behind her said, "The proportions are wrong on the stem here. But the detail on the petals is extraordinary."
She had turned around to tell whoever it was to mind their own business, and found Ethan Cole looking at her botanical print with the same focused attention he would later direct at quarterly earnings reports.
She said: "The proportions are intentionally wrong. It's more interesting that way."
He looked at her. "You illustrated these."
"I did."
He looked back at the print. "I stand corrected."
Then he said: "I'm Ethan Cole."
She said: "I know who you are. Your company's billboard is on my corner."
Cole's Market had been expanding aggressively for the last three years - premium organic grocery stores, the kind with exposed concrete and locally sourced cheese and a wine department staffed by actual sommeliers. They had seven Manhattan locations and the billboards were everywhere. She drew her grocery bags herself sometimes, for the principle of the thing.
"Does the billboard bother you?" he asked.
"Not especially," she said. "It's nicer than the one it replaced."
He smiled. It was a small smile, not a performed one. The difference mattered.
They talked for forty minutes. About the prints, about illustration, about the sourcing logistics of small-batch produce (he brought this up; she'd expected it to bore her and it didn't, because the way he talked about supply chains was the same way she talked about composition - with genuine investment in making the thing right). At the end of the evening he asked for her card. She gave it to him. She told herself it was a business lead - Cole's Market used illustration in their branding. She told herself she wasn't holding her breath.
He called three days later. Not about Cole's Market branding.
That had been February. Now it was December, and Sophia was wearing a diamond ring she still sometimes forgot was there, and standing in his penthouse watching him work a room, and trying to figure out how she had arrived here.
The love part she understood. She had fallen in love with him sometime in March, quickly and without much warning, the way you step off a curb that was slightly higher than you thought. She had not told him this. She had learned, by then, that Ethan Cole did not deal well with declarations. He dealt well with facts, with plans, with the specific and the concrete. I love you was none of those things.
What she wasn't sure about - what she had been trying to figure out for ten months now, in the quiet of her studio on the days he didn't call and the louder quiet of the days he did - was what he felt.
