42

Sierra’s POV

Six months was long enough for a new kind of normal to feel permanent. Louis and I had perfected the art of the public partnership and the private ceasefire. We attended functions as a united front—the powerful Trevanes, philanthropic, devoted, impenetrable. At home, we operated like CEOs of separate divisions under the same corporate banner. Logistics were discussed over tablets, not dinner. Katie’s schedule was a color-coded masterpiece of handoffs. We were efficient. We were civil. We were dead inside.

My world had narrowed to two poles: the flourishing, fragrant universe of Savarina, and the quiet, watchful eyes of my daughter. Katie was six now, sharper, more observant. The simple joys of stuffed animals and playgrounds were beginning to be edged out by harder questions. She’d started first grade at the prestigious, security-vetted academy, a world of other children from glass houses.

The first tremor came on a Tuesday afternoon. I was picking her up from a playdate at the home of another “legacy” family. As we drove away in the silent, armored car, she stared out the window, her small face thoughtful.

“Is Daddy mad at you?” she asked, her voice quiet against the hum of the engine.

The question was so blunt it stole my breath. “No, bug. Of course not. Why would you think that?”

“He doesn’t look at you anymore. Not like he looks at me.” She fiddled with the strap of her backpack. “Lily’s parents look at each other. They smile secret smiles. You and Daddy just… talk about things.”

My heart cracked cleanly down the middle. She saw it. She saw the absence. We had given her every material thing, a fortress of safety, and in doing so, we had failed to give her the one thing that truly made a home: the unspoken language of love between the people who built it.

“Grown-up relationships are complicated sometimes, Katie,” I said, the explanation as weak and tasteless as overcooked pasta. “Your daddy and I love each other very much, and we love you more than anything. That’s what matters.”

She was quiet for a long moment, accepting the unsatisfying answer because she had no other choice. “Okay,” she said, but the doubt had been planted.

The second tremor was worse. It was parent-teacher conference day. Mrs. Albright, a kind woman in her sixties, praised Katie’s intelligence, her kindness, her easygoing nature. Then she tentatively slid a drawing across the table.

“This was from a free-draw session last week. The prompt was ‘My Family at Home.’”

I looked down. Katie had drawn our mansion with meticulous detail. There she was, a stick figure with a yellow dress in the center. To her left, a tall stick figure labeled ‘Daddy’ stood at a big box labeled ‘Office.’ Lines came out of the box, like rays. To her right, a smaller stick figure labeled ‘Mommy’ stood at a box labeled ‘Bakery.’ Similar rays. The three figures were connected by dotted lines, not solid ones. In the corner, she’d drawn a small, smiling sun. But between the ‘Office’ and the ‘Bakery,’ she’d drawn a thick, black, scribbled wall.

“She said,” Mrs. Albright said gently, “that Mommy and Daddy work very hard to make nice things for people, but the wall is so they don’t get their work mixed up.”

I stared at the chaotic black scribble between the two boxes. That was what she saw. Not love. Not connection. A wall. A necessary barrier to keep the two halves of her world from contaminating each other.

“Thank you for showing me,” I managed to say, my voice thick.

That night, after Katie was asleep, I didn’t go to my separate sitting room. I went to Louis’s study. He was at his desk, reviewing security protocols, his face illuminated by the cold blue light of a monitor.

“We need to talk,” I said.

He looked up, immediately on alert. “What’s wrong? Is it Katie?”

“It’s about Katie.” I entered, closing the door behind me. I placed the drawing on his desk.

He looked at it, his sharp eyes missing nothing—the detailed house, the labeled boxes, the dotted lines, the brutal, black wall. His face, usually so expertly composed, paled. He reached out a finger, tracing the scribbled graphite barrier. He didn’t speak for a full minute.

“She sees it,” he finally said, the words a hollow acknowledgement.

“She sees everything. She asked me if you were mad at me.” I hugged myself, feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. “We’re not giving her a family, Louis. We’re giving her a diagram. A corporate organizational chart with a child in the middle. We’re teaching her that love is a dotted line and that walls are necessary.”

He leaned back in his chair, the weight of it crushing him. “What would you have me do, Sierra? You don’t want me near you. I’m respecting that boundary. I’m trying to give you the space you need.”

“I don’t know what I need!” The confession burst out, fueled by months of stifled frustration and grief. “I need not to have blood on my hands! I need to not flinch when you touch me! I need to look at my husband and not see a ghost! I can’t have any of that! So instead, I’m giving my daughter a masterclass in emotional detachment, and she’s getting an A+!”

The silence that followed was fractured, alive with pain. He stood up slowly, walking around the desk. He didn’t try to touch me. He just stood there, a respectable distance away, a man facing the ruins of his greatest failure.

“Then we get help,” he said, his voice low.

I blinked. “What?”

“Not for us. I don’t expect that. For her. We find a child psychologist. The best one. We sit with her, together. We learn how to… co-parent in a way that doesn’t draw walls. We learn how to fake it better, for her sake.” The self-loathing in his voice was palpable. He was reducing the most intimate human connection to a skill to be learned, a performance to be rehearsed. And he was right. It was all we had left.

It was the most pragmatic, heartbreaking solution imaginable. “Okay,” I whispered.

The third tremor wasn’t emotional. It was digital.

Two days after our bleak pact, Marcus intercepted a sophisticated cyber-attack on the Savarina corporate server. It wasn’t aimed at financials. It was aimed at me. Someone was trying to access my private emails, my design portfolios, my recipe vaults—the intellectual heart of my brand.

The forensic trail was ghostly, but it led back to a shell company with tenuous links to Alexander Vance. It wasn’t a takeover bid this time. It was sabotage. A petty, poisonous attempt to steal what I’d built and tarnish it on the way out.

Louis brought the report to me in the test kitchen. His expression was cold fury. “He’s not coming for me. He’s coming for your piece of the empire. To prove he can break what’s mine.”

The possessive ‘mine’ should have rankled. Instead, in the face of this new, targeted threat, it felt like a grim fact. I was his, in all the ways that mattered to men like Vance. A flag planted on a hill.

“What can we do?” I asked, the ‘we’ coming easier now, forged in the shared front of protecting our assets.

“We do what we should have done months ago,” he said, a ruthless glint returning to his eyes—the glint I’d begged him to direct away from shadows and into the light. “We don’t just defend. We dismantle. Legally, financially, publicly. We take his attempt to steal from you, and we use it to launch a shareholder lawsuit for corporate espionage and unfair competition. We hit him with a legal tsunami so loud it drowns out every other move he can make.”

He was talking about using the law as a weapon. A clean, bright, devastating weapon. It was the kind of fight I had asked for.

“Can we win?”

“Absolutely.” He looked at me, and for a flicker, I saw the shadow of the partner he could have been, the king who ruled by daylight with fierce intelligence, not by night with hired knives. “We have the evidence. We have the narrative. And we have the better story. The hungry shark trying to steal from the working mother. We’ll bury him in paperwork and bad press.”

He laid out the plan. It was aggressive, expensive, and brilliant. It required our full, unified cooperation. Meetings with lawyers, strategy sessions, public appearances to project unwavering strength.

We were being forced back into alliance. Not by love, not by desire, but by a common enemy and the shared, desperate need to protect the separate worlds we’d built within our shared fortress—his empire, my bakery, our daughter’s fragile sense of reality.

As we stood there in the kitchen, the air smelling of vanilla and impending war, I realized the horrible truth. The wall Katie had drawn wasn’t just between us. It was around us. And the only way to keep what was inside safe was to stand back-to-back, staring out at the threats, never turning to look at each other.

“Okay,” I said again, the word becoming our truce, our vow, our sentence. “Let’s bury him.”