Chapter 14 - The Ghosts We Carry
For a long minute, neither of them moved. The only sounds were the distant horn of a fishing boat heading into the bay and the low hum of the drying kiln in the corner.
Silas stepped between them, his hand resting near a heavy oak mallet on his workbench. "Can I help you, mister? This is private property."
"It’s all right, Silas," Claire said, her voice completely level. "He was... an acquaintance from New York. Give us a moment, please."
Silas narrowed his eyes at Vincent, sensing the raw, volatile tension crackling in the air, but nodded once and retreated up the wooden stairs to his loft workshop.
Vincent took two hesitant steps forward, his polished city boots kicking up cedar sawdust. He looked around the drafty workshop—at the drying clay, the humble woodstove, the cot tucked into a curtained corner where she slept on late firing nights. The contrast between this rustic barn and the eighty-four-hundred-square-foot marble penthouse on Fifth Avenue was an indictment written in every rough-hewn beam.
"You look well, Claire," Vincent said, his voice cracking slightly. "Your color is back."
"I am well," Claire replied coolly, crossing her arms over her chest. "State your business, Vincent. I have a kiln cycle to monitor."
Her absolute lack of emotion hit him harder than a physical blow. He had prepared for screams; he had prepared for her to throw clay tools at his chest; he had prepared for curses. But this icy, polite detachment terrified him. It meant she hadn't just left him; she had evicted him from her heart entirely.
"I fired Vanessa," Vincent blurted out, taking another desperate step toward her. "She’s in federal custody. She’s facing twenty years for corporate fraud and endangerment. She intercepted your calls, Claire! Three hundred calls! She blocked you from my phone! If I had known... God, Claire, if I had known what was happening in that ambulance—"
"Stop," Claire commanded. Her voice was not loud, but it cut him off instantly.
She walked around her workbench, stopping six feet away from him. Her hazel eyes were clear, steady, and unyielding.
"Don't put this on Vanessa, Vincent. Vanessa didn't create the fifteen-minute rule. You did."
Vincent flinched as if struck across the face.
"Vanessa was just the symptom," Claire continued, each word delivered with surgical precision. "You hired her because you wanted a human shield between yourself and messy human emotions. You wanted a marriage that fit on a balance sheet. When I stood in that emergency room with blood on my coat and stitches in my womb, Vanessa didn't tell me to go home and take a sedative. You did. You looked at your watch. You took her to Le Bernardin."
"I was blind!" Vincent dropped to his knees right there on the sawdust-covered floorboards, uncaring that his thousand-dollar coat was dragging through dirt. Tears spilled openly over his cheeks, pooling in the stubble along his jaw. "I was an arrogant, blind fool! I thought providing wealth was protecting you! I thought if I built a fortress of money, nothing could ever touch us! I didn't realize... I didn't realize I was killing you inside it!"
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Claire looked down at the billionaire kneeling before her. Once, she would have knelt beside him, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed away his pain. But that Claire had died in the wreckage on FDR Drive.
"You didn't just kill me, Vincent," she whispered, her eyes shining with unshed tears for the first time. "You killed our child's father before they even had a chance to take a breath."
