Chapter 8 - The Seven-Year Simulation
The realization did not arrive as an explosion; it settled into the marrow of Claire’s bones like radioactive dust, poisoning every memory she possessed.
She stepped closer to the Belgian glass, her bare toes stopping an inch from the gilded baseboard. She stared into her own brown eyes—eyes that she now realized Vincent had never once looked into.
When he had made love to her in this very bed, his heavy, muscular frame pinning her to the charcoal linen, his hands framing her jawline with an intensity that had made her weep with devotion, he hadn't been looking at Claire. He had been staring through her irises, projecting the phantom of Sophia Whitmore onto her retinas.
She remembered the nights he would wake at three in the morning, sitting on the edge of the mattress with an unlit cigarette, staring at her while she pretended to sleep. She had thought he was guarding her from his nightmares.
He was verifying the likeness.
She remembered the perfume. On their first Christmas together, he had presented her with an unlabelled crystal flacon filled with a dark amber liquid—a bespoke blend of bitter orange, crushed tuberose, and smoky birch tar. He had forbidden her from wearing any other fragrance. “This is your scent, Claire,” he had whispered, burying his face into the crook of her neck. “It belongs only to you.”
Tonight, when Sophia Whitmore had brushed past her in the grand foyer on her way to the sitting room, the air had been thick with that exact same bitter orange and smoky birch.
Every gift had been a prop. Every dress had been a costume. Every compliment had been a quality-control check on a forgery.
The humiliation was so vast, so cosmic in its absolute erasure of her personhood, that it bypassed the mechanism of tears entirely. Claire did not cry. Her hazel-brown eyes remained dry, clear, and terrifyingly cold in the mirror's reflection. Tears were an emotional currency reserved for broken hearts; what had just occurred in this bedroom was not the end of a relationship, but the unmasking of an existential crime.
Vincent Moretti had not simply broken her heart; he had stolen seven years of her youth to build a taxidermy shrine to a woman who had abandoned him. He had taken an intelligent, independent young woman and systematically re-engineered her hair, her posture, her scent, and her wardrobe until she was an acceptable prosthetic for his obsession.
And she had helped him. She had smoothed down the silk; she had pinned up her hair; she had worn the rubies; she had smiled for his cameras, proud to be the consort of the most powerful man in Chicago.
May you like
Claire looked down at her faded white T-shirt and her old blue jeans.
The cotton felt different now. It didn't feel like a costume of defiance; it felt like the only real thing left in the universe. It was the only thread of fabric in this multi-million-dollar estate that hadn't been chosen by a madman to match the wardrobe of a ghost.
