Chapter 7 - THE TORN SKETCHBOOK
The aftermath of Marcus’s visit left an invisible, toxic fog inside our small apartment.
Even though the police had verified that Bennett had fled across state lines to Pennsylvania, and even though Vance’s security team had installed twenty-four-hour monitoring at our building and the bakery, the damage had been done.
Chloe had stopped wearing her red shoes.
They sat on the bottom shelf of her closet, pristine and glossy inside their felt bag, untouched. She began waking up at 3:00 a.m. in cold sweats, creeping into my narrow bed to press her forehead against my ribs, making sure I hadn't vanished into the night.
Her leather sketchbook lay closed on her desk.
One Saturday afternoon in late March, as the first pale green buds began to show on the maple trees along Washington Square Park, Vance arrived at our apartment carrying a heavy wooden carpenter’s box.
He didn't knock; he used the key I had given him two weeks earlier.
He found me sitting at the kitchen table, staring blankly at a batch of rising sourdough, my eyes ringed with exhaustion. In the adjacent alcove, Chloe sat cross-legged on her bed, staring out the window at the brick alleyway, holding a pencil stub but drawing nothing.
Vance set the heavy wooden box on the kitchen floor with a solid, echoing thud.
“Pack a bag, Nina,” he said softly.
I looked up, startled. “What? Vance, I have the Sunday morning bake tomorrow—"
“Marcus and the secondary team are handling the bakery for the next seventy-two hours,” Vance interrupted, walking over to press a kiss to the crown of my head. “We’re leaving the city.”
An hour later, the black Mercedes crossed the Mario Cuomo Bridge, heading north into the rolling, forested hills of the Hudson Valley.
Forty-five miles outside Manhattan, the highway gave way to winding, two-lane country roads bordered by ancient stone walls and blooming apple orchards. We turned down a long, private gravel driveway flanked by towering sugar maples, pulling up to a breathtaking nineteenth-century stone farmhouse surrounded by sixty acres of rolling emerald meadows and private woods.
“Where are we?” I asked, stepping out into the clean, sweet mountain air.
“This is Meadowbrook,” Vance said, stepping up beside me and wrapping his arm around my waist. “My grandfather bought this land in nineteen-fifty. When I was a boy, whenever the city felt too loud or the family business felt like a cage, this was the only place where I could breathe.”
Chloe stepped out of the backseat. She took one deep breath of the mountain air, her small sneakers crunching against the gravel.
Suddenly, a loud, joyful bark broke the silence.
Bounding around the corner of the stone barn was a massive, clumsy, four-month-old golden retriever puppy with paws twice the size of his legs. He skidded across the grass, tumbled over his own ears, and slammed directly into Chloe’s knees, knocking her flat onto the soft lawn.
Chloe gasped, then burst into a wild, ringing, unrestrained fit of laughter as the puppy began frantically licking her nose and ears.
“His name is Barnaby,” Vance told her, crouching down beside the tumbling ball of fur. “And he’s an absolute disaster at retrieving tennis balls. He needs a full-time trainer.”
Chloe wrapped her small arms around the puppy’s neck, burying her face into his golden fur.
For the first time in six weeks, the dark shadow vanished from her eyes.
That evening, a fire crackled in the massive fieldstone fireplace of the farmhouse living room.
I sat on a sheepskin rug, leaning against Vance’s chest, drinking mulled cider while Barnaby slept soundly across our ankles. In the corner by the bay window, illuminated by the warm amber glow of a reading lamp, Chloe had opened her leather sketchbook.
She wasn't drawing dresses.
She was drawing a house. A stone house with a massive chimney, three apple trees, a golden retriever with floppy ears, and three figures standing by the porch holding hands.
“Vance?” she called out into the quiet room.
Vance lifted his head from my shoulder. “Yes, designer?”
Chloe pointed the tip of her red Prismacolor pencil toward the paper. “Are there red shoes in the country?”
May you like
Vance smiled—a deep, beautiful, permanent expression that reached every corner of his soul.
“Only the ones with gold stars, Chloe,” he said softly. “Only the ones that know how to run through the grass.”
