Chapter 2 - The Woman He Thought I Replaced
Vincent arrived at my hotel twenty-two minutes after I told him he could come.
I knew because I watched every minute pass on the clock above the television.
I also spent every one of those minutes telling myself I would not touch my stomach when he walked through the door.
The pregnancy test was still hidden inside my suitcase beneath a folded sweater. I had taken three of them that morning, as if the second pink line might disappear if I argued with it long enough.
It had not.
When someone knocked, I opened the door only halfway.
Vincent stood in the hallway without a coat, though November wind pressed against the hotel windows hard enough to make them tremble. His tie was gone. His black shirt was open at the throat. For the first time since I had known him, he looked like a man who had driven too fast because he was afraid of arriving too late.
He held my divorce certificate in one hand.
“You came all this way to return trash?” I asked.
His jaw tightened.
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Sophia told me what was in the envelope.”
I stepped back and let him enter.
I had expected anger. Maybe suspicion.
Not the expression on his face.
It was the same look he had worn once, two years ago, when a man he trusted had betrayed him and three people had died because of it. Cold on the surface. Something violent underneath.
I closed the door.
“The document only proved she lied,” I said. “I gave it to her because I was tired of being treated like an idiot.”
“It proved more than that.”
Vincent placed the certificate on the desk.
The document in the red envelope had been an old travel record I found by accident six months earlier while organizing papers for a Moretti Foundation event. Sophia had always told people she had been in Chicago the night Vincent was nearly killed twelve years ago. She spoke about it often enough that everyone eventually accepted it as fact.
But the record showed she had entered France two days before the shooting and had not returned to the United States for nearly a month.
At the time, I had thought it was merely another lie from a woman who enjoyed controlling the story people believed about her.
Apparently I had been wrong.
“What did she confess?” I asked.
Vincent looked at me.
“That she lied about saving my life.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“When I was twenty-three, I was shot behind an old theater on Wabash Avenue. I lost enough blood that I barely remember getting inside. A woman found me there.”
He spoke slowly now, like every word had edges.
“She stopped the bleeding. Called an ambulance from a pay phone because mine had been destroyed. Stayed until she heard sirens. Then she disappeared before my men arrived.”
I said nothing.
Something inside my memory moved.
A dark hallway.
Rain against broken glass.
Blood on my hands.
I pushed the thought away.
Vincent continued.
“I never saw her face clearly. There had been a blackout in the building. I remembered her voice. A bracelet. And something she said before she left.”
“What?”
His eyes remained on mine.
“She told me, ‘If you live through tonight, try becoming someone worth saving.’”
My fingers went cold.
Twelve years disappeared.
I was nineteen again.
A freshman volunteering at a small theater fundraiser because Madison had begged me to come. A storm had cut power to half the block. I had gone looking for the fuse box and found a stranger collapsed beside the stage entrance.
There had been so much blood.
I had tied my scarf above the wound. Pressed both hands against his side. Yelled at him to stay awake.
He had tried to grab my wrist.
I had told him exactly those words.
If you live through tonight, try becoming someone worth saving.
I sat down because my knees suddenly refused to hold me.
Vincent’s expression changed.
“Claire?”
I looked at him.
“You were the man behind the theater.”
The room became very quiet.
His face emptied.
For several seconds, Vincent Moretti—the man I had watched walk into rooms full of armed men without changing expression—simply stared at me.
Then he took one slow step forward.
“No.”
I almost laughed because the word sounded absurd.
“Yes.”
“You never told me.”
“You never asked whether I once ruined a silk scarf trying to stop a stranger from bleeding to death.”
His gaze dropped to my left wrist.
A thin pale scar crossed the inside of it.
He reached for me, then stopped before touching.
“The bracelet,” he said.
I swallowed.
“What bracelet?”
“Silver. Small blue stones. One clasp broken.”
My grandmother had given me that bracelet when I turned sixteen.
I lost it that night.
The air left my lungs.
Vincent turned away, pressing one hand over his mouth.
It was the first time I had ever seen him look shaken.
“Sophia told me the bracelet was hers,” he said.
I stared at his back.
“When?”
“Eight years ago. She knew details about that night no one outside my family should have known. She said she had been afraid of what I was becoming, so she left Chicago. I believed her.”
“And when she came back?”
His shoulders tightened.
“She said she wanted to explain why she left.”
I stood.
“So that was it.”
He turned.
“What?”
“The great love story.” My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “The woman who saved you. The one you never forgot. Sophia came back and suddenly the wife your grandmother chose became unnecessary.”
“That is not what happened.”
“Then explain it.”
He looked toward the window.
For a moment I thought he would shut down again.
Then he said, “I moved into the hotel because someone tried to kill you.”
I stopped breathing.
Vincent looked back at me.
“Six weeks after my grandmother died, one of my security teams intercepted a man outside the mansion. He had photographs of you. Your schedule. The route you took to the foundation office.”
A chill moved over my skin.
“What did he want?”
“He never got the chance to tell us.”
The meaning was obvious.
I hated that I understood it.
Vincent continued.
“Two days later, someone sent me a message. It said my wife would die if I didn’t step aside from a deal involving the Moretti shipping companies.”
“And your solution was to disappear into a hotel and let me think you were avoiding me?”
“My solution was to make whoever was watching believe our marriage was over.”
I laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“You could have told me.”
“If I told you, your behavior would change.”
“So you decided I was too stupid to protect myself?”
“No.” His voice sharpened. “I decided I could not risk someone putting a bullet through you because of my name.”
“And Sophia?”
“That is where it stopped making sense.”
He reached into his pocket and placed his phone on the desk.
On the screen was a photograph of a printed message.
DIVORCE HER BEFORE SOPHIA RETURNS. MAKE IT BELIEVABLE.
Below the words was a second photograph.
Me leaving the Moretti Foundation.
Taken from across the street.
My pulse hammered.
“Who sent this?”
“We don’t know.”
“And you obeyed?”
“I stalled for three weeks.”
“Then Sophia arrived.”
“Yes.”
“And you filed.”
His silence answered for him.
The anger came back so fast it almost felt comforting.
“You let someone else decide the end of our marriage.”
“I thought ending it would keep you alive.”
“You thought wrong.”
Vincent flinched.
Barely.
But I saw it.
He looked at the suitcase near the bed.
“Your flight is tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“You cannot take it.”
I almost smiled.
“There he is.”
His eyes narrowed.
“The man who thinks every sentence is an order.”
“Claire—”
“I signed your divorce papers. I am no longer your wife. You do not decide where I go.”
“I’m not asking as your husband.”
“Good. Because you are not one.”
Pain moved across his face before he buried it.
Then his phone rang.
He looked at the screen.
Everything in him changed.
“What?” he answered.
A voice spoke too quickly for me to understand.
Vincent’s eyes lifted to mine.
“Where?”
Another pause.
His face turned hard.
“Lock the building down. No one leaves.”
He ended the call.
“What happened?” I asked.
He crossed the room and picked up my suitcase.
“Put on your shoes.”
I stared at him.
“Vincent.”
“Sophia was attacked twenty minutes ago.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Who did it?”
“We don’t know.”
He looked at me, and for the first time that night I saw something worse than anger in his face.
Fear.
“But before she lost consciousness,” he said, “she told my men the person behind all of this knows about the document you gave her.”
My throat tightened.
May you like
Vincent stepped closer.
“And she said you are next.”
