(Sophia's POV)
In seven years of marriage, Sebastian and I never had anything close to a real life together.
He was rarely home. Two nights a month in the same bed was generous. We didn't talk-not really. We coexisted in the same house the way two objects share a shelf, aware of each other's presence without any actual contact.
At the end of our first year, he left for the New York office. It was part of his plan, the long methodical climb through every branch of the Vance empire. I understood that. I had always understood that.
What I hadn't understood was what would happen the night before he left.
He came home from a client dinner completely drunk-not the controlled, two-glasses-of-scotch drunk I occasionally witnessed, but genuinely, thoroughly gone. He reached for me in the dark, and for the first time in our marriage, there was no careful distance, no deliberate restraint, no contraception. He was unrecognizable. Desperate and unguarded in a way I had never seen from him.
That night, for the first time, I understood that his coldness had always been a choice.
Two months later, I was standing in our bathroom at six in the morning, staring at two pink lines on a test strip, my hand shaking so badly I had to set it down on the counter.
I stood there for a long time.
He had always acted as though children were simply not a possibility-not a decision, not a refusal, just an absence of the question entirely. I had believed it. And now here was evidence that the question had an answer after all.
I was naive enough to wonder if it could change things.
I flew to New York.
I told myself I just needed to see his face when I told him. That his reaction would tell me everything.
I waited outside his office building for two hours in the January cold before he came out. He saw me and stopped. Something crossed his face-surprise, then something I couldn't read-and then it was gone.
He didn't introduce me to the colleagues walking beside him. He said something quietly to his assistant, and the assistant led me to a car.
I told myself that was just discretion. That he was being careful.
I was very good at telling myself things.
He came back to the apartment late that evening. He showered without a word, walked out in a towel, and bent to press his mouth against my ear. His hands were already moving.
His eyes were somewhere else entirely.
I pushed him back gently. My heart was hammering.
"If we had a child," I said, "do you think we could-"
He pulled away.
Not gradually. Immediately. He rolled onto his back beside me, stared at the ceiling, and his voice came out flat and final.
"If you think having a baby is going to fix this marriage, don't."
I didn't say anything.