Chapter Text
Part 1
A dream is not a reality, but who's to say which is which?
There was perfection.
And then there was Sophie Bridgerton.
Benedict had seen enough in the world through masterpieces lining the walls of the National Gallery. He had sat with masters from the Continent, as well as the upstart Saturday Circle of the newest and the best artists to know the very definition of beauty. From pieces on loan to museums to private collections of elite society, Benedict could rightly claim that he had beheld beauty to the extent that very few could claim to know.
There was beauty, and there was art. And there was Sophie Bridgerton. He had met her when she claimed she was nothing, and within seconds of breathing her she was his everything. She was unassuming in a way that drew his attention in a crowded room, effortless when everyone around her tried. She was nameless in the high society within which he lived, the class where blood and the order of your birth mattered more than accomplishment or education. And even in the silent, throbbing disapproval of the world around them, Benedict reached outside the lines and drew her into his circle. It had been his mother’s ball, grand, invitation only, and Sophie Baek swept into his life unannounced and self-possessed.
From the moment that he saw her in her shimmering slip dress, she owned him. She was unlike every other woman who had sought him, that young woman who moved with efficiency and quiet confidence. Had she known how his eyes followed her every move, how his body turned to her every time she entered the room, she may have complained to his mother. Instead, he waited until the lull of the event that she had been helping to organize, and then Benedict extended a hand to her and was pleasantly surprised when she took his hand and breathlessly ran down to the private terrace with him.
Her half hour break, he had learned later, when the ball would be taken over by the alternate organizer. It had been her one chance to enjoy the rare event without minding the details, and she had chosen to spend it with him and miss participation.
“And I never regretted it for a single moment,” she assured him, in vows that were now carved in his very soul. “Missing thirty minutes pretending to be part of your world gave me a lifetime to be yours.”
And how she fit, how she molded, how she owned this world. Not hers to begin with, but hers from the moment she took his hand.
Now Benedict stood proudly in the audience as his wife took the stage of his mother’s masquerade. Violet Bridgerton beamed proudly at the daughter-in-law who would take up the mantle that had too long been carried by the dowager viscountess. Try as she might, Kate had no capacity to take over the charity gala that accompanied the annual masquerade along with the back to back births of her sons. Who would know, he heard the muttered side talk from behind him, that a girl from nowhere could be so articulate. She had not even attended the same prep schools as the rest of the socialites in last year’s ball. Benedict could only wonder why Sophie even thought to stand up for these ladies, on that first night when he met her. None of them would ever do her the same favor.
Sophie Bridgerton was flawless perfection.
It took a long time, a steady, neverending stream of attention, utter devotion until he convinced her. Diamonds on white gold lined her neck and graced her ears. His mother watched with nearly comparable pride as Sophie spoke about the beneficiary of the first gala that was hers. Decked in his mother’s jewels, dressed in a gown carefully fashioned by his sisters’ modiste, the moment that she made her case to the audience, she was all Sophie.
“Our family cannot thank you all enough for your generosity,” she said into the microphone, addressing the large contingent around the stage. “You have my heart and my gratitude. Having lost my parents at such a young age, I know that it is like to fall through the cracks, to be lost in the translation between childhood and adulthood. With your resources, St Anne’s Orphanage will be able to help children like me live in dignity, with care and support needed until they find permanent homes or start their adult lives.”
Benedict watched the graph on the screen as the pledges climbed. From below the stage, his smile widened. He met his mother’s eyes as Violet’s lips parted in surprise.
“Words cannot express how much I and the rest of the Bridgertons appreciate how fully you have embraced my term in heading the family charity. What a wonderful welcome this is to someone new, coming from outside this society. I suppose whatever they say about all of you out in the real world is simply not true,” she ended humorously.
An uncomfortable wave of laughter, and the ticker went past the blue line and well above the set goal. Sophie Bridgerton—toast of London. She was rich, powerful and had everything. Only Benedict knew about the tears she shed late into the nights, when they were in bed, blanketed by the pitch black night. Whenever she cried, she refused to let him turn on the light. And then every morning without fail, she would help him into his suit so he could go to work, and she slipped into one of her expensive dresses and searched for her cause.
~ o ~ o ~ o ~
To him, she was a gift, a prize that he won, a reward for all the years that he should have had more but never did. When she first realized this, the concept sat uneasily on her shoulders.
And now there she sat, in an office so cold and white and sterile that she would later remember nothing that stood out. There were no picture frames to tell her about the man who sat behind the desk, no cheery paintings on the walls to distinguish this room from the others.
She supposed it was this fine new hoteling concept, where the doctors could use any of the rooms they were assigned. Sophie was certain that later Benedict would insist on specialized doctors in one of those fancy hospitals, whose names were embossed on gold name plates outside their office. Knowing him, he would probably insist on ones whose very names were lit and emblazoned outside the hospital itself.
Sophie had always known that this was too good to be true.
He was too good to be true. This entire mariage was a farcical fairy tale, a departure from her common, nondescript life.
After all, Sophie Baek was not a person who looked up from the humdrum daily life of catering to others born better and bred better only to find herself swept away by the promise of a better life. It did not matter that the promises came accompanied by his deep, searching—prettiest—eyes. It did not matter that the words he uttered were words she had never heard before. It did not matter that he spent the last twenty four months fulfilling every one of them.
Insignificant. The clipped word, in that voice of a woman that he had tried so very hard to help her forget, haunted the back of her mind like a phantom. There was no way to block out the voice when it came wrenchingly from the very pits of your stomach. A deadweight to this family that needs to move forward, floated the words from her memory of a tear-stained sheet of paper.
And maybe he knew. She was certain that he knew. He had lived with her nightmares being the only inheritance that she brought into this failure of a marriage.
She knew he knew in the way his hand closed over hers, in the way that his fingers laced through hers, in the firmness of his grasp. His silent plea for her to look up, she recognized from the shift of his shoulders, the way he leaned forward in that chair, and heat that radiated from his body to impossibly warm hers even from that distance.
Like he called to her and her body, involuntarity, responded back.
Two years in this fairy tale was more than she deserved, enough memories to last her a lifetime, she consoled herself. Benedict had fulfilled his part in their bargain. He had given her more than she thought possible on the day that he led her through the yawning halls of his childhood home, a spectacle to a woman who had nothing to her name. But he had always been larger than life.
Larger than her life.
Twenty four months was enough memories to return to when she was alone in a cold night.
The memory alone of his face, beaming, spilling over with the light reflect from the chandelier—how he mesmerized her with those shining stars gleaming in eyes that played a masquerade of colors when he offered her his entire world.
And now here she was, left hand entwined in his in a grip so tight that she feared he was never letting go; right hand forced steady as she held the doctor’s tablet, looking down at the screen showing her in stark definition the proof of everything she had heard and known and for Benedict—refused to accept—or at least temporarily suspended her belief.
Sophie Baek never deserved everything that he offered, least of all given.
This was pretense, a long masquerade that only she would be able to end.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered under her breath. His hand squeezed so tightly it hurt. And she wondered whether she hurt him more or the other way around. "I'm so sorry."
And then there he was, kneeling in front of her. His expensive trousers sliding down the cold tile floor. He released her hand, and then since she still refused to look at him, he took the tablet from her hand and tossed it to the doctor’s desk like it mattered none when it was all that she could think of. He cupped her cheeks, then lifted her tearstained face to his.
He could not win this. He already lost.
Sophie shut her eyes tightly. She had courage, but not enough to withstand the broken grief that would dim his light.
It was not like she had forgotten the nights that they escaped from the ruckus of his impossibly large family, giggling breathlessly as they ran across the compound to slip under blankets that he dragged through the dewy grass.
No, she never forgot the nights when he waxed poetic about his dreams of children, a full home of eager boys and loving girls, to build a family as closely knit as the one from where he came.
Family above all. The family motto imprinted in the halls of a life that should have been out of reach, a world that he gave to her, and now glaring at her in its bold, cursive taunt.
No, she never forgot. She would never forget. She would cradle them close to her breast in the long, lonely nights that would be sure to follow. They would keep her warm with the knowledge that the life she chose was for him.
Because she loved him. And he deserved more than Sophie Baek, who came to him with nothing and, it turns out, could give him nothing in return.
"Look at me," he said firmly.
Sophie shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t—“
"Look at me," he repeated, this time in half of a whisper, this time without demand, this time in a pitiful please.
Even she could not deny that.
Finally, she opened her eyes and met his gaze.
And there it was—the grief that could bury her, the mourning for a loss. “Please, I cannot take more,” she said softly, praying he would let her turn away.
He raised himself on his knees, eyes level with hers. For the first time in her life, she wished the person before her looked at her with loating, with blame, with anger. She had steeled herself against it many times before Benedict. Loating and anger, disgust and blame—all of these she knew. But this grief, this utter desperation in her husband’s eyes—they were beyond even a lifetime of strife.
“Read it,” she urged.
“I know what it says,” he told her. Her brows furrowed. “I received the soft copy on the way. The lab sends them on email, remember?”
Yet when he met her at the lobby, he had taken her in his arms. The brush of his lips against her temple was the same, the whispered greeting, an affirmation of his love, sounded the same as any other day in the two years of their marriage.
And there, behind the sadness, was the same look of love as the one that he had on their wedding day.
But she was Sophie Baek, and this fairy tale was not real. The pretense had gone on long enough, and reality had come raging. If she could only do one thing for him, it was to save him from the farce.
"It's me, Benedict. I'm the reason we still don't have a baby!"
“I read the results. I do not need a rehash,” he pressed. Stiffly. There it was, the flash of impatience, the spark of annoyance. She latched on to it, grasping and grappling and storing it in the banks of her memory where she could pull it out, where she could come back to it, where she could soothe herself in the years to come. Benedict shook his head. "No, you are not using this as a reason to leave. You are not going to take a split second of my lowest moment out of a hundred million seconds between our marriage and our relationship before that, to justify your need to run away when it becomes difficult.”
“I need to look out for you,” she said softly.
“I am not a child. And this is not what breaks us.”
She did not even know when it was that the doctor slipped away, or if the world simply fell away. The next thing that she knew is that Benedict’s arms wrapped aroud her, warming her from the cold air of that stark room.
“Only one thing in the world is capable of breaking me,” he mumbled into her hair. “And it’s not standing with you through this, Sophie. It is not being able to stand with you at all.”
Tears slipped from her eyes. "Why is this happening, Benedict? We want one so much. We've been trying for two years!" she exclaimed. "Your brother slept with his girlfriend one time and he gets her pregnant! Her cousin had goodbye sex with her boyfriend before getting deployed and gets knocked up. She didn’t even want to get pregnant!"
"Benedict," she murmured into his shirt, "I'm the reason you can't fulfill your dreams."
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed her skin over the wedding band. Benedict dried her tears with his fingers. "You are my dream," he replied. “If you want to remember anything at all about today, you remember that.”
Sophie settled her head on his shoulder and looked up at him.
And she was all too familiar with the longing in his eyes.
Tbc