Sophie

Sophie

Penthouse

From the moment I saw her, covered in blood—my husband’s blood—I acted so quickly, almost without thought. Everything I did was to protect my daughter. It is possible that I was in shock too but my mind seemed very clear. I have always been single-minded, focused. Able to make the best out of a bad situation. It’s how I ended up with this life, after all.

I knew that if I were to have the cooperation of his sons, their help in this, Jacques would have to be alive. I knew that it had to be Benjamin who had died. Before I wrapped the body I had held Jacques’ phone up to his face, unlocked it, changed the passcode. I have kept it on me ever since, messaging Antoine and Nicolas as their papa. The longer I could keep Jacques “alive,” the more I could get out of his sons.

After I had done what I could for Benjamin—stemming the blood with a towel, cleaning the wounds—the concierge and I brought him up here to the chambres de bonne. He was too concussed to struggle; too badly injured to try and free himself. Here I’ve been keeping him alive—just. I’ve been giving him water, scraps of food: the other day a quiche from the boulangerie. All until I could decide what to do with him. He was so badly wounded that it might have been easier to let nature take its course. But we had been lovers. There was still that reminder of what we had briefly been to each other. I am many things: a whore, a mother, a liar. But I am not a killer. Unlike my beloved daughter.

“Jacques has gone away for a while,” I told my stepsons, when they arrived. “It is best that no one knows he was here in Paris tonight. So as far as you know, should anyone ask, he has been away the entire time on one of his trips. Yes?”

They nodded at me. They have never liked me, never approved of me. But in their father’s absence they were hanging on my every word. Wanting to be told what to do, how to act. They have never really grown up, either of them. Jacques never allowed them to.

I think of the gratitude that I’d felt to Jacques in the beginning, for “rescuing” me from my previous life. I didn’t realize at the time how cheaply I had been bought. I didn’t free myself when I married my husband, as I’d thought. I didn’t elevate myself. I did the exact opposite. I married my pimp: I chained myself to him for life.

Perhaps my daughter did the very thing I hadn’t had the courage to do.