Chapter 3 - The Cold Penthouse
The elevator doors opened directly into the private foyer of the 6,000-square-foot penthouse overlooking Lake Michigan. Usually, when Vincent stepped through those doors after a grueling day, the atmosphere greeted him like an embrace. The scent of roasted rosemary chicken or slow-simmered beef broth would drift from the open kitchen. Soft jazz would be playing on the hidden speakers, the temperature would be dialed precisely to seventy-one degrees, and a fresh pair of house shoes would be waiting neatly by the bench.
Today, the apartment was freezing.
The silence was vast, hollow, and unnatural.
"Claire!" Vincent shouted, throwing his coat onto the foyer settee. "Claire, where the hell are you?"
No answer. His footsteps clicked sharply against the imported Italian marble as he strode into the living room. Everything was immaculate, but it was the immaculateness of a museum where the exhibits had been abandoned.
He marched into the master bedroom. The closet door stood wide open.
Vincent stopped dead in his tracks.
The left side of the walk-in closet—his side—was overflowing with tailored bespoke suits, silk ties arranged by color, and rows of polished Oxford shoes. But the right side, which had held Claire’s simple, elegant wardrobe for eight years, was completely stripped bare. The wooden hangers hung empty, chiming faintly against each other in the draft from the hallway vent.
Her jewelry box sat open on the vanity. Inside lay every piece of fine diamond jewelry Vincent had ever purchased for her to wear at charity galas. She hadn’t taken a single bracelet. She hadn’t taken the sapphire necklace that had cost him three hundred thousand dollars at an auction in Geneva. Beside the velvet box lay her diamond wedding band and the flawless eight-carat engagement ring.
Next to the rings was a plain, white greeting card.
Vincent approached the vanity on trembling legs. He picked up the card. Inside, in Claire’s neat, familiar script, were only four sentences:
*You told me Sophia needed you because she depended on you.*
*I made the mistake of protecting you so well that you thought you were invulnerable.*
*You are free now, Vincent.*
*Do not come looking for us.*
"Us," Vincent choked out. The paper shook in his white-knuckled grip.
He spun around and rushed into the master bathroom. He tore open the medicine cabinet, the drawers, the laundry hampers—looking for any shred of evidence. In the wastebasket beneath the sink, tucked underneath a discarded box of cotton rounds, he saw the corner of a glossy cardboard package.
He fished it out. It was a prenatal vitamin box. Three strips were missing.
Beneath it was a crumpled receipt from Northwestern Memorial Women’s Health Clinic, dated two weeks prior, listing an initial obstetrics consultation and early fetal heartbeat monitoring.
Vincent’s breath seized in his lungs. The reality crashed down upon him with the force of an avalanche. She wasn't bluffing. She wasn't playing a game through her high-powered attorney to extract a billion-dollar settlement.
Claire was pregnant with his child.
May you like
She had been carrying his baby while he came home smelling of another woman’s perfume. She had been sitting alone with this miracle while he sat across the kitchen counter, casually loosening his tie and announcing that he wanted a divorce because another woman made his ego feel inflated.
A sharp, agonizing spasm ripped through Vincent's chest. He dropped the receipt, clutching his ribs, sinking onto the cold marble floor of the bathroom. The silence of the penthouse pressed in on him from every wall. For the first time in his thirty-six years of life, the mighty Vincent Moretti was entirely alone, and he had no idea how to survive the monster he had unleashed.
