CHAPTER 8
POV: Vivienne He knocked once.
Firm. Exact. The kind of knock that expected the door to open because it always had.
I stood on the other side with my hand on the deadbolt and counted to five before I turned it. The warehouse door was heavy, salt-swollen wood that scraped against the frame when it moved. I opened it just enough to see him and no farther.
Cassian stood in the rain like he had forgotten weather could touch him. Dark coat. Hair wet at the edges. The same face that had looked out from a hundred business magazines, except the control in it was thinner now. Cracked along the edges.
He didn’t try to step forward.
“Vivienne.”
My name in his mouth sounded careful. Rehearsed.
I said nothing.
He took a breath. I watched his chest rise and fall under the coat. Somewhere behind me the kiln ticked as it cooled. The only sound that belonged here.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Two words. Clean. Insufficient.
I waited.
He kept going, the way he always did when silence made him uncomfortable. He told me he had fired Sienna. He told me the board had pushed back. He told me he had seen the studio, the message, the dust. He told me he had driven for hours in the rain because he finally understood what he had lost.
I listened to every word.
I did not cry.
I did not soften.
My hands stayed loose at my sides. My spine stayed straight. The quiet rage that had lived under my ribs since the night I left the city stayed exactly where I needed it—banked, controlled, useful.
When he finished, the rain filled the space between us.
I looked at him the way I used to look at a piece of clay that had collapsed on the wheel—assessing the damage, deciding whether it could be saved or whether it needed to be cut away.
“You built me a studio,” I said, “and never looked inside it.”
His mouth opened. I didn’t let him fill the silence.
“You hired the woman you almost married and let her call me a liability in front of cameras. You said nothing.”
The words came out level. Not loud. Not shaking. Each one placed with the same care I used when I set a wet form on a shelf to dry.
I watched them land.
Something moved behind his eyes—guilt, recognition, the first real understanding of how deep the cut went. I did not look away. I wanted him to see that I was still standing. That the woman who had smiled through seven years of being invisible was no longer available for rewriting.
He started to speak again.
I closed the door.
The latch clicked. Soft. Final.
I stood there with my palm flat against the wood and listened to the silence on the other side. No second knock. No voice calling my name. Only the rain and the slow tick of the kiln and the sound of my own breathing.
My hands started to shake.
I locked the deadbolt. Turned. Put my back to the door and slid down until I was sitting on the cold concrete, knees drawn up, forehead pressed to them. The shaking moved from my hands into my arms and then into my chest. I locked my teeth together and waited it out.
The warehouse was dark except for the single work light over the table. The sculpture I had been building—the kneeling figure—watched me with empty clay eyes. I stared back at it until the tremor in my fingers slowed.
I whispered the words into the empty room, low enough that even the rain couldn’t carry them outside.
“Don’t you dare break now.”
Then I stood up, wiped my hands on my jeans, and went back to the clay.