Chapter 5 - The Anatomy of a Phantom
The mind under trauma operates with the cold, microscopic precision of an optical printer, layering negative over positive until the hidden image burns through the emulsion.
Claire did not move her hand from her cheek. Her fingers remained pressed against her skin, mapping the underlying bone structure, while her eyes continued to bore into the glass.
For seven years, she had lived inside Vincent Moretti’s private world. For seven years, she had accepted his aesthetic commands as manifestations of an intense, possessive devotion. She remembered the third month of their relationship, when she had casually mentioned cutting her dark hair into a modern, chin-length bob; Vincent had caught her wrist with an iron grip across the breakfast table, his dark eyes flaring with an intensity that had terrified her, commanding her never to cut it—telling her that her long, dark waves were the most sacred thing she possessed.
She remembered the way he had hired personal stylists to teach her how to apply her eyeliner: “A soft, upward wing at the outer corner, Claire. Never heavy. Just enough to elongate the brow.”
She remembered the three-week trip to Rome during their fourth year, when he had taken her to an antique jeweler on the Via Condotti and bought a set of vintage teardrop earrings set with deep pigeon-blood rubies—earrings that were currently sitting in the velvet safe in the adjoining dressing room. When she had put them on, Vincent had stood behind her in the hotel suite, his hands gripping her shoulders so tightly his knuckles had bruised her skin, staring at her reflection in the gilded Italian mirror with an expression that looked like an agonizing, bleeding wound.
At the time, she had thought he was overwhelmed by love. She had thought he was a brutal man who had found his redemption in her face.
Now, standing in her twenty-dollar jeans and faded white T-shirt, stripped of the jewelry, stripped of the Florentine silk, stripped of the socialite persona he had constructed around her, the raw canvas of her face was laid bare.
And for the first time in seven years, she saw the canvas for what it truly was.
She looked at her dark hair, pinned loosely at the back, cascading around her jaw.
She looked at the curve of her collarbones, exposed by the simple crewneck.
She looked at the melancholy, unsmiling gravity in her dark brown eyes.
May you like
A sharp, violent wave of nausea surged from the pit of her stomach into her throat, hot and acidic. The room tilted. The air in her lungs turned to glass.
Her memory shifted backward—not through seven years of romance, but through forty-five minutes of time—descending the grand marble staircase of the Moretti estate, moving through the arched limestone foyer, and stepping into the private downstairs sitting room where the fire had burned low in the hearth.
