She looked at the boy who hadn't looked up once, entirely consumed by his blue crayon. Then she looked back at Dean. He was already reaching for his tool belt, ready to unbuckle it. He meant it. He would walk away from a lucrative contract without a second thought.
Keep working, Claire said, her voice dropping a fraction of an octave. I need this room finished by the end of the month. " Dean didn't say thank you. He just picked up the scraper and turned back to the oak. Claire stood there for another 20 seconds. Neither of them acknowledged her.
She was a ghost in her own house. For the first time in a decade, she turned around and walked away without having the last word. Two weeks later, the rain was coming down in sheets. It was a miserable, biting November downpour that turned the upstate roads into slick, black ribbons. Claire was in the back of her chauffeured town car staring at the blurred lights through the tinted glass.
Her phone was hot against her palm. She had just spent 3 hours on a conference call aggressively dismantling a competitor's supply route in Eastern Europe. She had won. She had secured a monopoly on the route. It would bump Vanguard's Q4 profits by 11%.
She felt absolutely nothing. Just a dull, throbbing ache at the base of her skull and a metallic taste in her mouth. "Where to, Ms. Montgomery? " her driver asked softly from the front. She thought of her penthouse in Manhattan.
4,000 square feet of glass, steel, and Italian leather. It was immaculate. It was empty. The thought of stepping into that silent, sterile box made her chest tighten with an anxiety she refused to acknowledge. "Take me to the house," she said.
By the time they pulled into the muddy driveway of the estate, it was past 9:00 at night. The scaffolding looked like a skeletal ribcage against the stormy sky. There were no cars save for a battered, 10-year-old Ford F-150 parked near the side entrance. Dean was still here. Claire told her driver to go get a hotel in town and come back in the morning.
She unlocked the heavy front doors and stepped inside, shaking the water from her coat. The house was cold, but the sharp smell of chemicals and dust was gone, replaced by the rich, warm scent of linseed oil and cedar. She walked toward the library. Warm yellow light spilled out from the doorway, throwing long shadows across the hallway floor. She stopped in the frame.
The room was transformed. The fireplace was fully restored, the wood glowing with a deep, historic warmth. The built-in bookshelves along the far wall had been stripped and were halfway through being restained. Dean was sitting on a sturdy wooden crate in the center of the room. He wasn't working.