Chapter 8: The Things That Needed to Be Said
Victoria Whitmore was sitting in her car in the estate parking area when Sophia found her.
The door was unlocked.
The engine was off.
Victoria was still in her wedding dress, her veil removed, her bouquet lying across the back seat with the same careful placement of something handled before grief fully arrives.
Sophia stood beside the passenger window.
Victoria looked at her for a moment, then reached across and unlocked the door.
Sophia got in.
They sat in silence for a moment, both looking forward through the windshield at the stone wall of the estate parking area.
"Your father told my father," Victoria said.
"He called him twenty minutes ago."
"I know."
"My father is on his way from Edinburgh." A pause.
"He'll be furious.
He liked Daniel." She said it with a strange, flat calm.
"He liked him very much."
"I'm sorry."
Victoria turned to look at her.
"Are you?"
"Yes," Sophia said.
"Not for coming here.
But for what you're going to have to go through." She paused.
"It's not easy.
I know."
Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"The money," she said.
"He paid for all of this with stolen money."
"Yes."
"I chose the flowers.
I spent four months choosing flowers." She looked at the bouquet on the back seat.
"Fourteen hundred dollars of flowers.
With someone else's retirement."
"Yes."
Victoria pressed her hand flat against the steering wheel.
"I didn't know.
I need you to know that I didn't know."
"I know you didn't."
"How do you know?"
"Because I know how he operated," Sophia said.
"He kept everything in separate compartments.
That was how he managed it for as long as he did.
You knew what he let you know.
So did I."
Victoria looked at her.
"He told people you were — that you had problems.
That you couldn't handle the end of the relationship."
"I know.
Gerald told me."
"I believed it." The admission was direct and without softening.
"I heard it and I believed it and I didn't question it because it was easier not to." She paused.
"That wasn't right."
"No," Sophia said.
"It wasn't."
"I'm sorry."
The apology sat between them, simple and unexpected.
Sophia had not come here for it.
She wasn't sure she had even known she needed to hear it until she did.
"Thank you," she said.
Victoria looked out through the windshield again.
"He said things to me, too.
About how things had ended between you.
How you had pushed him away." She shook her head slightly.
"All of it reframed now."
"He was very good at reframing."
"Yes." A pause.
"Did you love him?"
Sophia considered the question honestly.
"I thought what we had was real.
I believed in what I thought it was." She paused.
"Whether that's the same as love, I'm not sure anymore."
"I thought I loved him," Victoria said.
"Now I can't tell how much of that was him and how much of it was — everything I had built around him." She gestured vaguely.
"The wedding.
The dress.
The idea of what came next."
"That's a real kind of loss," Sophia said.
"Even if the thing you lost wasn't what you thought it was."
Victoria was quiet for a long moment.
Then she said, "What do I do now?"
"I don't know," Sophia said honestly.
"I'm still figuring that out myself."
Something shifted in Victoria's expression — not quite a smile, but close.
The very beginning of something that might become one, eventually, in a different season.
She looked at Sophia's jacket — her father's jacket, still draped over the torn dress.
"He really did rip your dress," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry for that too."
"I know."
The stone wall in front of them was catching the last of the evening light, turning a warm amber that had nothing to do with either of their circumstances and everything to do with the fact that the world continued regardless.
"I'm going to need a lawyer," Victoria said.
"My father's firm has people," Sophia said.
"I can ask him."
"That feels strange."
"It is strange," Sophia agreed.
"But it's also practical."
Victoria almost laughed.
It didn't quite make it out.
But it almost did.
"All right," she said.
They sat there a moment longer, two women in a quiet car, the remains of a ruined wedding behind them and everything that came next still ahead, unknowable and open.
Sophia opened the car door.
"Take care of yourself," she said.
"You too," Victoria said.
Sophia stepped out into the cooling evening air.
The light was almost gone now.
The estate's exterior lamps had come on, casting the stone walls in warm gold.
She could hear, faintly, the voices of her father's team from inside.
She walked back toward the garden gate, unhurried.
The dress underneath the jacket was still torn.
Her shoulder still ached where she had been grabbed.
May you like
But she was walking forward.
That was enough for tonight.
