Chapter 4 - The House by the Sea
Four hundred miles to the north, the Atlantic Ocean pounded against the black granite cliffs of coastal Maine.
The caretaker’s cottage sat on a high bluff overlooking the dark, wild sea, surrounded by dense stands of white pine and balsam fir. It was a simple timber-frame building with a steep tin roof, a broad covered porch, and tall windows that caught the pale, silver sunlight of the northern coast.
Vivien stood on the porch, wrapped in a thick wool sweater, holding a steaming mug of peppermint tea.
The air here was sharp and clean, smelling of salt, pine resin, and cold ocean foam. There were no sirens. No dark-suited security guards standing silently in the hallway. No phones ringing with news of dock strikes or political bribes.
She breathed in deeply, feeling her lungs expand without the tight, agonizing constriction that had gripped her chest in Manhattan for three years.
Inside the cottage, a fire crackled softly in the stone hearth.
She had spent the last three days unpacking her simple clothes, setting up her drafting table near the east-facing window, and stocking the small kitchen with fresh vegetables, milk, and bread from the local market five miles down the coast.
The local town—a fishing village named Blackwood Cove—didn't know who she was. To the elderly grocer and the local mechanic, she was simply Vivien Arden, an architect from Boston who had moved up to design a seaside home.
Vivien sat down at her drafting table, unrolling a clean sheet of heavy vellum paper.
She picked up her graphite pencil.
For three years, her hands had been still. She had let her talent rot while she played the role of the Mafia boss’s elegant, silent wife. But as she touched the pencil to the paper, the muscles in her hand remembered instantly.
She began to draw.
She drew the lines of the main house—the wide overhangs, the low-pitched roof built to withstand winter gales, the massive stone fireplace that would anchor the living room, and the nursery on the second floor, designed with a low balcony facing the sunrise.
Her baby kicked.
It was a tiny, fluttery sensation, like the brush of a butterfly’s wing against the inside of her stomach.
Vivien stopped her pencil. She set her palm flat against her belly, her eyes brimming with warm, quiet tears.
"I hear you," she whispered to the empty room. "I hear you, my love."
She didn't miss the penthouse. She didn't miss the galas, the designer dresses, or the silk sheets.
Sometimes, in the dead of night when the wind howled through the pine trees outside her window, she missed the way Lorenzo used to hold her before he became a king. She missed the man who used to kiss her shoulder in the dark and tell her that as long as he had her, the rest of the world could burn to the ground.
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But that man had died somewhere along his rise to power.
And Vivien knew she had to stay alive for the child growing inside her.
