CHAPTER 10
POV: Vivienne
Three weeks.
That was all the time I had left.
I stopped sleeping in any real way. The cot in the back corner became a place I fell onto when my hands could no longer close around the clay.
I kept a bucket of cold water near the wedging table and shoved my split fingers into it when the stinging turned sharp enough to blur my vision.
The water turned pink. I changed it and kept working.
Every piece that rose under my palms was a year I had spent invisible.
The first large form was the galas. I built it tall and hollow, the surface smooth and polished until it reflected the work lights like black glass.
Inside, I left the walls deliberately unfinished—rough, scratched, full of the fingerprints I had never been allowed to leave on the actual events.
I had planned those nights down to the placement of every fork and the temperature of the lighting.
I had stood in the background in dresses chosen to complement whatever Cassian needed to project.
The sculpture stood in the center of the warehouse like an accusation that had finally learned how to take up space.
The second piece was the dinners. Smaller.
Denser. A table surface that had been warped and cracked down the middle, place settings half-swallowed by the clay itself.
I pressed the edge of a real knife into the wet surface and left it there to dry.
Guests had sat at tables I arranged for seven years and never once asked who had decided the seating.
Cassian had smiled at the heads of other companies while I made sure the wine service never lagged.
The knife stayed embedded. I did not remove it.
The empty studio became a series of collapsed vessels.
I threw them on a makeshift wheel until they rose, then deliberately pushed them off center so they folded in on themselves.
Each one carried the exact angle of the shelves I had filled and the exact silence that had answered me every time I hoped he might appear in the doorway.
I fired them hotter than recommended. Some cracked in the kiln.
I kept the cracked ones. They told the truth more clearly than the perfect ones ever could.
The night he said nothing became the largest piece in the room.
I worked on it for nine days.
A standing figure, slightly larger than life, head turned away.
One hand open at its side, the way mine had been open the night Sienna leaned in and whispered control your wife and Cassian had looked straight ahead as if the words had never reached him.
I carved the mouth shut. I left the eyes unfinished.
When people walked past it in the gallery they would feel the absence before they understood it.
My hands bled daily now.
The cuts reopened every time I centered a new ball of clay. I stopped noticing the sting. The blood mixed with the slip and disappeared into the dark gray surface. It felt correct. The work had cost me something visible at last.
I named the exhibition on the fourteenth night, standing in the middle of the warehouse with clay drying on my forearms and the ocean roaring somewhere beyond the thin walls.
The Things He Never Looked At.
The title needed no explanation. Anyone who had ever been erased would recognize it. Anyone who had done the erasing would feel it land.
Helen called two days later to confirm the installation schedule. She did not ask for artist statements or soft lighting or any of the usual buffers people wanted when the work cut too close. She simply said the gallery would be cleared and ready. I hung up and kept working.
The pieces multiplied.
I stopped counting them. The warehouse filled until there was only a narrow path from the door to the kiln.
Broken spines. Open mouths. Tables that could no longer hold anything.
Figures that refused to face forward. Every one of them was a quiet year given shape and weight and the right to take up space.
On the night the call came, I was refining the edge of a final small vessel—the only piece that still looked anything like the work I used to make. I had left it almost delicate on purpose. A reminder of the woman who had believed patience might be enough.
My phone lit up at 11:47 p.m.
Helen’s name.
I answered with clay still on my fingers.
“Someone just tried to buy the entire show,” she said. No greeting. “Every piece. Offered well above asking, payment through a shell company. I traced the paperwork because the number felt wrong.”
I waited.
“The buyer of record is a subsidiary that leads straight back to Reed Dynamics.”
The warehouse went very quiet.
I looked at the kneeling figure in the corner—the one that still wore Cassian’s shoulders—and felt the momentum I had been building for three weeks gather into something harder and brighter than rage.
“Don’t sell anything,” I said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
I ended the call and set the phone down on the table.
Then I turned back to the clay, hands bleeding, and kept working.
The show was no longer just an exhibition.
It was the first thing he would not be able to look away from.