“No.” She continued in the same tone. “I would never lie about something like this.” She swallowed another sob. “Helena needs help. But Eric was worried that if he told you, you’d go all crazy and act like an overbearing bastard. Actually, he clearly had a point.” She lifted the bag over her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” He demanded.
“Away.”
“Where?”
She laughed, a harsh, jangling sound. “Nowhere you’ll be able to find me. I need time to myself.”
“Sophie, you need to tell me what you mean about Helena.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t need to do any damn thing you say.” She pulled the bag over her shoulder. She moved towards the door, a strange emptiness spreading through her. “Did you really marry me just for the sake of your sister?”
He stared at her long and hard; his silence, though, spoke volumes.
“Okay.” She could no longer stop the tears that were moistening her eyes from falling. She turned around and walked back to him. She tilted her face up to his. “You need to know that I married you because I loved you completely. You need to know that, because one day, you’re going to realise that I’m telling the truth. And on that day, you deserve to feel as guilty as hell for using me like this.” She saw the shock on his face with some satisfaction. “I don’t love you anymore. In fact, I don’t think I ever really knew you.” Her cheeks were wet and her chest was heaving with the pain of breathing. “Goodbye.”
“You cannot leave like this. We have to discuss …”
“I beg your pardon.” She paused just outside the door. “We have nothing to discuss. Everything we were was a lie.”
Downstairs, in the long hallway, she pulled her credit cards out of her wallet and left them on the mantle. Her ring she added to the pile of things she no longer needed. They belonged to Alex’s wife, and Alex’s wife had just been some poor sucker who’d allowed herself to be manipulated into believing in love.
That woman was not Sophie anymore.
She would never believe in love again.
CHAPTER NINE
“I am afraid I do not comprehend what you are saying.” Alex sat down in his leather office chair with a gnawing sense of disbelief. Could this be some kind of trick? Had Sophie fooled her replacement into spreading these lies?
“I’m sorry, sir, but you asked me to report anything untoward to you.”
Yes, he had, but he’d meant a secret love affair between Eric and Sophie. Not this, of all things.
Elaine continued, when Alex didn’t speak. “I believe your sister needs to see a specialist. Perhaps even to be admitted to hospital for a time.”
“And on what do you base this conclusion?”
“I have seen it before. The sense of disconnection is a hallmark. Your sister is … vacant … even when she is with the children.”
“She’s not maternal,” he countered firmly.
“This is different, sir.”
He stared out of the window. Sophie had warned him. And he’d ignored her. He hadn’t wanted to believe that she might have been right.
Sophie. Had she really been gone three weeks already? He lifted her ring from his desk without noticing that he was doing it. It was a constant reflex with him these days. He would stare at it and remember the way her face had looked at it in complete confusion, the first time he’d shown it to her. The way she had insisted it was far more than she needed. The way she’d said she loved it, because he’d chosen it.
His gut twisted.
Everything in the house reminded Alex of Sophie. Everything. She was everywhere he looked, and yet she was nowhere.
“Are the children affected?”
“On some level, certainly. There is a wariness with them. An obvious preference for their father and me. They try to orchestrate outings that exclude their mother, as though they’re attempting to form a family unit with me and Eric.”
Alex had seen all this before. Only he’d blamed Sophie. He’d blamed Sophie and Eric. “And what do you do?”