Not that she’d tell anybody—a young wife is supposed to love sex, isn’t she? But Sophie didn’t. Pierre wasn’t tender, and she wasn’t excited; she submitted to it out of duty. Sex was what married people did. But she kept the lights off, so he wouldn’t see her biting her lip, the occasional grimace of pain. By common consent, outside the bedroom, they never spoke about it. Pierre didn’t complain. And Sophie didn’t trouble to ask why not.

Pierre had provided magnificently for them, of course. There was nothing they could ever want. And he would kiss her and squeeze her hand and give her little compliments. Sophie cherished these; she didn’t realize she was starving for true affection. But the unbridled love of her baby boy had changed her world, and she had blossomed then, like a daisy uncurling its petals towards the sun.

She had no idea when Tom had started to slide away from her. Eton, maybe. Boarding school. Towards the end of his time there. She agonized again in the backseat of the car, as she had done so many times. Was that a fatal mistake? Sending him away? But Pierre had been so adamant he shouldn’t be a mama’s boy, and she hadn’t wanted that either.

Precisely because he was her only one, her little one, she hadn’t wanted to smother him, make him, God forbid, effeminate. And when he started to get a reputation, when she got a call from the school about an affair with a local girl, well. Despite her faith in God, Sophie had secretly sighed in relief. He was a normal boy. Of course she had lectured him sternly. His father would never have done such a thing. . . .

Well, she had confessed the gladness and been sternly lectured herself. But now, now she wasn’t quite so glad. There were women, countless women, so she had heard, in unguarded remarks from his friends. And she believed it. And even though he’d made it into Oxford, he wasn’t working, wasn’t bothering. Wasting his fine mind.

More hurtfully, he wanted less and less to do with her. It seemed to her that her baby suddenly disliked everything about her.

That call—well. It had been dreadful. Sophie was expecting it, but—dreadful, all the same.

She was doing this for Tom’s own good. Sophie snapped open her Chanel purse and took out her spotted cloth handkerchief, a relic from her childhood, a little piece of her English life that she carried with her everywhere. A secret rebellion against Pierre and all his grooming of her as a proper grande dame. Of course, not much of a rebellion. She had obeyed him in almost everything.