CHAPTER 17
POV: Vivienne
We began again in the smallest possible increments.
Cassian canceled a full week of meetings.
I found out only when he arrived on Monday morning with a rented van and a quiet question about which sculptures still needed to be moved to Helen’s storage before the next show.
He did not frame it as a grand gesture. He simply stood in the doorway of the warehouse with the keys in his hand and waited for me to decide whether the help was welcome.
I said yes.
We worked side by side packing the remaining pieces.
He asked where the stress points were on each form, how much padding the thinner vessels needed, whether the cracked ones should travel upright or on their sides.
Real questions. Not the polite ones people asked when they wanted to look interested.
I answered them. He listened without interrupting and then followed the instructions exactly.
The old fear still lived under my ribs. It watched every interaction for the moment the attention would drift, for the phone that would pull him back into the world that had always mattered more.
Some hours the fear stayed quiet. Other hours it sat so heavily I had to step outside and breathe the salt air until my hands stopped wanting to protect the clay from him.
He kept showing up anyway.
On the third day he asked about the clay itself.
Why I preferred the darker stoneware body for the larger work.
What happened to the surface when I burnished it instead of glazing.
How I knew when a piece was finished and when it still needed to sit.
I answered while we wrapped a tall vessel in foam.
He nodded, repeated one of the technical terms back to me to make sure he had it right, and then handled the piece with a care that made the fear ease half a degree.
We did not talk about the marriage. We did not talk about Sienna or the charges or the nights he had slept on the warehouse floor.
The silence around those subjects felt deliberate on both sides, a mutual agreement that the present tense was still too fragile for the past to enter without breaking something.
The week settled into a rhythm. Coffee on the step if I was not yet awake.
Shared work through the middle of the day.
Simple food in the tiny kitchen when the light started to go.
He left each evening without being asked, the same way he had in the beginning, giving me the room back when the day was done.
On the sixth night I woke a little after two and saw light under the door that led to the main studio space.
I almost stayed on the cot. The fear preferred that option—leave the mystery alone, keep the boundary clean, do not risk finding out that the careful attention of the daytime had limits. Instead I stood up, pulled on a sweater, and walked quietly across the cold concrete.
Cassian sat on a low stool under the work lamp with his back to me.
In his hands was the small unfinished vessel that had survived the attack—the one I had wrapped in his old T-shirt the night I left the city.
A clean break ran along one side where it had been knocked to the floor in the chaos.
I had set it on a shelf and left it there, unable to decide whether repairing it would be an act of hope or an act of denial.
He was repairing it.
Not with clay. He did not yet have the skill for an invisible mend.
He was using a fine archival adhesive I kept for structural cracks, applying it with a patience I had never seen him give anything that could not be measured in market share.
His shoulders were bent. The lamp turned the dark hair at the nape of his neck the same color as the wet clay I used for joining.
He worked as if the small vessel were the only thing in the world that required his full attention.
I stood in the doorway and watched.
The fragile hope I had been carefully rationing for weeks rose without permission.
It mixed with the old fear until I could not tell which one was stronger.
Part of me wanted to step back into the dark and preserve the distance that still felt safest. The larger part stayed where it was, one hand on the doorframe, and let the quiet scene imprint itself.
He must have felt the shift in the air. He looked up.
For a moment neither of us spoke. The only sounds were the distant ocean and the soft tick of the kiln cooling from the day’s firing.
Cassian’s eyes met mine. There was no performance in them, no strategy, no attempt to turn the moment into proof of change. Only the same stripped honesty he had been practicing since the morning he first brought coffee and silence to my door.
“I should have been the one protecting this,” he said.
The words landed in the space between us and stayed there, heavy and plain.
I did not answer right away. I let the fear and the hope finish their quiet argument in my chest. Then I stepped fully into the room, crossed the concrete floor, and sat down on the opposite stool while he returned his attention to the small broken vessel that had somehow survived everything else.
We sat like that until the sky began to lighten, two people sharing the careful work of mending what had been left in pieces, neither of us certain yet whether the repair would hold.