Page 93 of Trying Sophie

“Sure.” She took a breath and nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

“It was that bloke Stephen, wasn’t it?”

Her eyes widened and her head jerked back, surprised by my observation, probably by my even remembering the guy’s name in the first place. When I felt her body clench for flight, I locked my arm around her waist to hold her in place. She struggled for a second but then relaxed and, taking a moment to compose her features, studied me speculatively.

“How did you …?”

On the one hand, I had this weird sense of pride that I’d seen something in Sophie no one else had—that I did know her as well as I’d always assumed I did—but on the other, I felt a strange churning in my gut at having spoken aloud the name to the only man Sophie had ever loved.

I ran my hand in tiny circles across her back, as I told her what I’d figured out along the way, pausing here and there to try and find the words to accompany the thoughts that had simmered in my brain for far too long.

“I told you I read your blog and your articles for as long as you’ve been writing them, yeah?” When she shook her head I glanced down at our entwined hands and ran my thumb across her knuckles, back and forth, then looked back up, willing her to see the sincerity of my words. “I told you, I know you Soph.”

Her brows furrowed in uncertainty. “Someone must have told you.”

“How would anyone tell me something about you and him?” I demanded, my tone somewhat belligerent.

Taking a deep, calming breath, I continued, “No one, save your grandda, knows how I … what I …” I took in another breath and pushed that confession aside for a later time.

“Look, I know you said you don’t share who you really are on your blog, but there’s a part of you—a very big part—that you do. No don’t interrupt,” I interjected, placing my fingers over her mouth. “Let me finish.”

When she nodded, I said, “I think you hide in plain sight. Maybe I’m wrong, but when you wrote about your time with Stephen there was something … more … about that trip. I don’t know how to describe it, not really, except to say your descriptions became more vivid, your thoughts more introspective, and it just felt like you were being more heartfelt in your experiences.”

“I never said his name,” she whispered when my hand fell away.

“No,” I agreed slowly. “You didn’t.”

I don’t think I’d ever crossed any lines, but to explain how I’d pieced it all together might make me sound like a stalker.

“Then how?” She notched her chin, the stubbornness she’d inherited from the Fitzpatrick side of her family evident in her determined features.

“What if I said I think you wanted people to know about him?”

She flinched and went to move away again so I held onto her.

“No, don’t run. Hear me out,” I implored. “I hate to burst your bubble, but it wasn’t that hard.”

I looked toward the ceiling, mentally running through everything of hers I’d read during that time until the lightbulb had gone off and I’d realized what she was saying … without ever actually saying it.

“You’d been blogging about your trip and it was all ‘my friend and I woke to a gentle fog rolling through the Sitka spruce,’ and ‘my friend and I reeled in a fish together that was as big as my leg,’ or ‘my friend and I tasted a special wine made from grapes from 100-year-old vines.’”

Shock registered on her face when I quoted her own lines back to her. I thought about quitting while I was ahead, but I’d come this far so the only thing to do was to finish what I’d started.

“Shortly after, your granny was showing off an article you’d written that was basically a condensed version of your road trip and it got me thinking. I flipped through the pages, which is when I noticed the photos had been taken by a Stephen something or other. At first I figured he was just the photographer you were working with but then you started attributing pictures on your blog to him and it piqued my curiosity even more. There was one …” I trailed off, hesitant to say too much about the photo I’d printed out and even now had hidden in my wallet.

In it, Sophie was tan, her long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail and tucked into a red cap. She’d been standing on a hill, looking out across a vineyard, her right hand shielding her eyes from the sun. I remembered thinking the photo was more intimate than the others she’d posted, that whoever had taken it might have done so without her knowing. She’d looked relaxed, happy. She’d seemed at peace.

Sophie swallowed and then whispered, “Which one?”

“The vineyard.”

“Right.” She blinked and looked away. “The vineyard.”

I was surprised when I heard a note of scorn creep into her voice. When she moved to rise, this time I let her go, sensing she needed space to think without me crowding her.

As she paced across the suite, she told me about her relationship with Stephen, from its beginning until the bitter end, three weeks after that photo had been taken. They’d known each other casually as he’d been the photographer for one of her first big assignments. Their relationship had remained strictly professional for a long time but they’d gotten close on a three-week excursion to Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, that ended with a trek to Machu Picchu. The trip had been plagued with problems, including botched accommodations, broken down transportation, and several people falling ill along the way. They’d started sleeping together before the first week was over. By the time they reached the mountain’s summit, she and Stephen were inseparable. On their flight back to the U.S., he’d told her he had fallen in love with her.

“When the trip was over, we compared schedules and made plans to meet as often as possible. Because we were both freelancers, we were able to coordinate our assignments so that I wrote the articles and he took the photographs,” she explained, and I got the impression she wanted me to understand how it’d happened, why she’d fallen so quickly and so easily for him. “After a while our clients started to view us as a package deal, happy to hire us as a pair.”

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