The Daily Vibe

Website

The Daily Vibe Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from The Daily Vibe, United State, Columbia, MO.

“You’ll Always Come First !” the Mafia Boss Told His Mistress — 7 Days Later, His Bride VanishedShe knew something was w...
10/15/2026

“You’ll Always Come First !” the Mafia Boss Told His Mistress — 7 Days Later, His Bride Vanished

She knew something was wrong before she reached the door.

The private wing of the Moretti estate was supposed to be empty. Vincent had told her he would be downstairs with his senior men until after midnight, and Clare had come home early only because the charity dinner in Providence had ended sooner than she expected.

She still wore the ivory silk dress. Four days ago she had stood in it in a church in front of two hundred people, and the white roses from the ceremony still stood in enormous crystal arrangements along the hallway, and the wedding gifts were still unopened in the adjoining sitting room, and her gown had only been packed away yesterday.

She had spent the drive home thinking about finding Vincent, taking off her heels, and laughing about how strange it still felt to call him her husband.

Then she heard a woman laugh inside their bedroom.

Clare stopped.

The sound was soft. Familiar.

Sabrina Cole.

For several seconds, Clare simply stood there. Sabrina had been part of Vincent's life for years. Officially she handled social events and certain relationships useful to the Moretti organization. Unofficially, Clare had always known there had once been something between them.

Before the wedding, Clare had asked him directly.

Is there anything left between you and Sabrina?

Vincent had looked straight into her eyes. No.

She had believed him.

Now the bedroom door was open less than an inch. Her hand moved toward it, then stopped.

A sound came from inside.

Clare's stomach tightened. She did not need to open the door. She already understood.

The bedroom had been renovated for the wedding. Vincent had chosen the dark walnut furniture because Clare liked warm wood more than marble. She had chosen the cream curtains. They had stood together beside the fireplace three weeks earlier, arguing playfully over whether the room needed another chair.

On their wedding night, Vincent had carried her across that doorway while half the family laughed from the hallway.

Now Sabrina was inside.

Clare pressed one hand against the wall. Her first instinct was to enter — to throw the door open, to demand that Vincent look at her while he destroyed the promise he had made four days earlier.

Then Sabrina spoke.

So what happens now?

Silence.

Clare could hear the faint movement of sheets.

The wedding happened, Sabrina continued. Everyone saw it. Everyone knows she's your wife now.

Vincent answered quietly. That changes nothing between us.

Clare closed her eyes. The pain came so sharply she almost made a sound.

Sabrina laughed once, but there was insecurity beneath it.

You married her, Vincent.

I know.

And I'm supposed to believe I still matter.

There was another pause.

Then Vincent spoke the sentence Clare would remember for the rest of her life.

You'll always come first.

Something inside her went completely still.

Not broken. Still.

The affair hurt. The bedroom hurt more. But those four words did something different.

They explained everything.

Vincent had not made a mistake after the wedding. He had not been confused. He had not been seduced into one reckless moment. He had married Clare while already knowing exactly where he intended to place her.

Second.

Clare stepped backward. Her heel almost struck the small console table behind her, and she caught herself before the vase on top could move.

Inside the room, neither of them reacted. They had no idea she was there.

Clare looked once at the partially open door.

Then she turned away.

She walked down the hallway without rushing. Past the wedding photographs. Past the white roses. Past the framed picture taken only four nights earlier of Vincent looking at her as though there were no other woman alive.

By the time she reached the guest bedroom at the opposite end of the wing, her hands were shaking.

She locked the door.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed for ten minutes and did nothing.

She did not cry. She did not call anyone. She did not remove her wedding ring.

Eventually Clare looked down at the diamond on her finger. Four days ago it had felt like a promise. Tonight it felt like evidence of something she had misunderstood.

She inhaled slowly.

Then another thought came.

If Vincent believed Sabrina would always come first, what exactly did he believe Clare would do? Accept it? Adjust? Stay — because being Mrs. Vincent Moretti was too valuable to surrender?

Clare stared at the closed door.

For the first time that night, the pain inside her changed shape. Not into revenge.

Into a question.

Who was Clare Bennett Moretti if she stopped being protected by Vincent Moretti?

She did not know.

But she intended to find out. ....................................
Type '𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓'to view the full story. I’ll 'like' your comment once the link to the full post is published.
If you need to find the full post within the comments section, try this: go to the comments, select 'Most relevant' and switch to 'All comments'—then look for the 'blue text', click on it, and you will be directed to the full post.

The Mafia Boss Slapped His Wife for His Mistress—By Sunrise, She Was Gone Without a TraceThe sound was small.A flat, dry...
10/15/2026

The Mafia Boss Slapped His Wife for His Mistress—By Sunrise, She Was Gone Without a Trace

The sound was small.

A flat, dry crack, no louder than a ch*****ne cork, and then sixty guests went silent beneath the gold lights of the Shaw Estate ballroom.

Laurel's head turned with the impact. She did not touch her face. She stood very still in the black dress she had chosen eleven weeks earlier and looked at the space between her husband and his mistress — at where Beckett had put his own body without thinking, the way a man steps in front of a door.

Behind him, Taran Vale pressed trembling fingers to a cheek Laurel's hand had crossed a moment before.

Was she worth making me afraid of my own husband?

Beckett's hand dropped.

Laurel. Answer me.

He could command armed men without raising his voice. He could make a room full of dangerous people wait for permission to breathe. And the woman who had shared his bed for sixteen years was looking at him as if she had never seen him before.

Ten minutes earlier, he had come through the doors with Taran beside him.

It's necessary, he had told her across the ballroom, in the low voice he used for logistics. Someone had threatened Taran after learning about the relationship. He wanted her somewhere protected until his security team handled it.

You brought her here for one night. Laurel had not raised her voice either. Our night?

Don't do this here.

You already did.

She might still have endured it quietly. She had become frighteningly good at enduring things quietly — that was the part she would think about later, in the dark, on the road. She had spent years learning how.

Then Taran had walked to the anniversary table and picked up Beckett's untouched glass.

Still refuses ch*****ne before dinner, she said lightly, turning it in her fingers. Then, smiling: He always says the first drink should be something strong enough to make bad decisions look reasonable.

Beckett went still.

Laurel went still.

It was not a clever saying. It was theirs. Sixteen years earlier, before the estate, before the guards and the black cars, Beckett had said those words in a cheap roadside bar with a cracked neon sign, twenty minutes after Laurel agreed to marry a man every person she knew had warned her against. She had repeated them every anniversary since. It had been their private joke, and she had kept it in her mouth like a coin.

And now a woman in a silver dress was holding it up to the chandeliers.

Laurel crossed the space between them and slapped her.

It was not planned. It was not even anger, exactly. It was the sound a person makes when something inside them finally breaks and the body moves before the mind agrees.

Then Beckett reacted. One second. One terrible instinct.

And now Laurel stood in front of him with the answer she had apparently needed all along.

He stepped toward her.

She stepped back.

That hurt him more than the silence around them.

I didn't mean to hit you.

Laurel's eyes sharpened.

But you did. You struck her, and you chose who needed protecting.

Taran whispered his name behind him.

His head turned — slightly, a fraction of an inch, the smallest possible acknowledgment.

Laurel saw it.

Something in her expression disappeared. Not anger. Not tears. Just gone, like a light being switched off in a room she had already stopped standing in.

She reached for her wedding ring.

Don't.

She pulled it free. Sixteen years of wear had thinned the band on the inside, and it came off more easily than either of them expected.

Interesting.

What?

That's the first thing tonight you noticed fast enough.

She took his hand, turned his palm upward, and placed the ring in it. His fingers closed around it automatically, the way a hand closes around a coin thrown at it.

Laurel. We are not ending sixteen years in a ballroom.

No, she said. We didn't end them here.

She glanced once at Taran — one flat, unhurried look, the kind you give a piece of furniture you are about to leave in a house you are selling.

This is just where I finally saw the ending.

She walked away.

He nearly followed. Nearly.

Pierce Rowan appeared at his shoulder and murmured, in the voice men used around him when they had bad news: the guests were watching. Two senior captains were already asking questions. And Taran still needed secure transportation.

Beckett looked toward the ballroom doors.

Laurel was gone.

He told himself he would give her ten minutes.

Then thirty.

Then he spent another hour restoring order to a celebration that had nothing left to celebrate — smiling at men he would have to threaten later, accepting condolences for a marriage nobody had told him was over, and keeping his face still while the ring sat in his pocket like a swallowed stone.

At midnight he came into their bedroom.

Laurel appeared to be asleep beneath the covers, turned away from him, the dark mass of her hair on the pillow.

He stood in the doorway with his jacket still on.

Tomorrow, he said quietly.

She did not answer.

He slept badly, woke at five and lay listening to her breathe, and told himself that breathing was enough for one night.

At 5:48 he reached across the bed and touched cold sheets.

The shape beneath the covers was only a folded blanket, arranged with care by someone who did not want the absence discovered early.

Her phone was on the nightstand. Her credit cards were in the drawer. Every piece of jewelry she owned was in the box on the dresser — the earrings, the necklace from their tenth year, the watch. All of it. Arranged the way she arranged everything.

Beckett was downstairs before Pierce finished answering his phone.

Find her.

Pierce hesitated.

Her convertible is gone.

Beckett's jaw tightened.

That old silver car had been theirs before the estate. Before his empire. Before Laurel became Mrs. Shaw. ....................................
Type '𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓'to view the full story. I’ll 'like' your comment once the link to the full post is published.
If you need to find the full post within the comments section, try this: go to the comments, select 'Most relevant' and switch to 'All comments'—then look for the 'blue text', click on it, and you will be directed to the full post.

Mafia Boss Always Chose Her Over Me - So I Cancelled the Wedding and Never Looked BackFiola had white tablecloths and da...
10/14/2026

Mafia Boss Always Chose Her Over Me - So I Cancelled the Wedding and Never Looked Back

Fiola had white tablecloths and dark wood and a baby grand piano in the corner, and Sophia had booked the corner table by the window six weeks in advance, because Adrian liked to watch the river.

She arrived at 7:15 in a midnight-blue dress, her hair loose, her mother's thin gold watch fastened on the inside of her wrist where nobody could see it.

The hostess knew her by now. She led her to the table. A single candle was already burning.

Sophia ordered a glass of w**e to keep her hands occupied. She folded her napkin. She unfolded it. She checked the watch.

7:18. 7:22. 7:29.

At 7:30 she was smiling at the door.

At 7:40 she was still smiling, and the muscles around her mouth had begun to ache.

At 7:51 her phone buzzed against the tablecloth.

Isabella needs me.

She read it once. She read it a second time. There was no I'm sorry. No I'll be there as soon as I can. Just the sentence, plain and finished, like a door closing in another room.

She set the phone face down very gently, the way you set down something that might break, and looked out at the river, and did not cry, because there were people at the next table and because crying would have meant admitting what it meant.

Eleven blocks away, on the fourth-floor landing of a building on Dearborn Street, Adrian Romano was moving through the dark with a gun in his hand.

Isabella had called at 7:12, sobbing so hard she could barely form words. A man in a hood had been outside her door. He had said her name. She had locked herself in the bathroom.

He had run the red light outside the tower. He had taken the stairwell two steps at a time. And on the landing above her door he had found a lanky figure in a grey hoodie who raised something metallic and shaking, and who — when Adrian's own weapon came up — made a high, startled sound and bolted down the fire stairs like a rabbit.

Adrian chased him two blocks, through an alley, over a chain-link fence, past a row of dumpsters, and lost him behind the loading docks of a hardware store.

He stood there breathing hard. Rain was just beginning to fall on the pavement.

He did not know that the man he had chased was named Teddy Cole, or that the gun in Teddy's hand had never been loaded, or that Teddy was at that moment vomiting behind a dumpster because he had never in his life been so afraid.

He did not know that he had been sent for.

By the time he got back, Isabella was waiting in her doorway in a silk robe, shaking, mascara running down her face, and she threw her arms around his neck and would not let go.

His phone had died in the chase. The battery was drained to nothing.

His men swept the building. Isabella clung to his arm and begged him not to leave her alone. And in the confusion of all of it he did not think of the clock.

He sat on her couch with his gun on the cushion beside him and his jacket over her shoulders until a grey dawn came through the windows.

He fell asleep sitting up.

At Fiola, the last table was cleared.

The pianist played the same slow song three times for the empty chair across from her, and near eleven he stopped, caught her eye across the room, and gave her a small, wretched, apologetic nod — the kind you give a mourner.

The waiter, a young man with kind eyes, set a slice of lemon cake in front of her with a single candle in it and said nothing at all.

She blew it out.

She paid the bill. She left a very large tip.

She walked out into the rain, where her driver's car was no longer waiting, because she had told him to go home.

She took a taxi to the penthouse instead — because she had a key, and because some part of her she was not proud of still wanted to hear the explanation.

She sat at the long dining table in the dark with her coat still on and the wedding binder open in front of her: the seating charts, the flower samples, the neat lists in her own handwriting.

She watched the hands of her mother's watch move around the dial.

He had said he would keep the time.

She understood, sitting there, that nobody had been keeping it but her.

Adrian came through the door at 7:07 in the morning — rumpled, hollow-eyed, sick with dread — and stopped dead when he saw her.

She did not stand. She had taken off her coat. She sat very straight with her hands folded on the closed binder, and she looked as composed as a woman at her own funeral.

Sophia. His voice cracked. My phone died. I was going to call. I swear, I fell asleep, I—

You chose her again.

It was not a question. It was not an accusation. It was said very quietly, like a fact she had finally been brave enough to read aloud.

He dragged a hand over his face. You know she's important to me. A man was in her building. She could have been hurt.

I know she's important to you. Her eyes were bright with tears she refused to let fall. I've known that for three years. I'm asking something else.

She leaned forward slightly.

I waited for you for six hours, Adrian. In front of a pianist who felt sorry for me. So tell me — just once — tell me the truth. Because you promised you'd never lie. Her voice did not rise. What am I?

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

She watched him search for the answer. She watched the muscles in his jaw tighten. One second. Two. Three.

It was not that he did not love her. She could see that he did.

It was that the answer he needed was not where he had expected to find it — and he had spent three years never once placing her first.

That silence was the cruellest thing he could have said.

She nodded slowly, once, like a person confirming a diagnosis. Then she slid her left hand across the table, drew off the ring he had put on her finger in the rain, and set it down very gently on the polished wood, where it caught the morning light.

What are you doing? he said. His voice was barely a voice.

I'm cancelling the wedding.

Sophia. No. Don't. We can talk about this tonight. You're exhausted, you've been up all night, you're hurt, I understand—

I'm choosing myself.

She rose and slid her mother's watch back into place on her wrist, and picked up her coat.

I spent three years believing that love meant waiting, she said. I think I confused it with something else.

She walked to the door.

Have your mother call my father, she said. I'm not going to explain this twice.

The elevator took her down forty-one floors.

When the doors opened into the lobby, the morning doorman was mopping the tile and did not look up.

But across the street, under the awning of a shuttered coffee shop, a lanky man in a grey hoodie was standing in the rain, watching the entrance of the tower with both hands jammed in his pockets.

He saw her.

He went very still — the way a person goes still when they have been told they are invisible and have just discovered they are not.

The doors slid shut behind her.

He was already walking away. ....................................
Type '𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓'to view the full story. I’ll 'like' your comment once the link to the full post is published.
If you need to find the full post within the comments section, try this: go to the comments, select 'Most relevant' and switch to 'All comments'—then look for the 'blue text', click on it, and you will be directed to the full post.

"“I Won’t Read a Lie.” Mafia Boss Brought His Mistress—Then His Son Took the MicThe invitation had read The Draven famil...
10/14/2026

"“I Won’t Read a Lie.” Mafia Boss Brought His Mistress—Then His Son Took the Mic

The invitation had read The Draven family's twelve years, and Evangelene had approved that wording herself six weeks earlier, in a short email to the events coordinator.

She had chosen the flowers — white peonies, olive branches, formal but not cold. She had confirmed the seating. She had asked the hotel to bring up the brass candleholders from storage, the ones Raphael's mother had used at her own dinner parties, and to set them on the head table beside a framed photograph of the three of them on the coast of Maine.

In the photograph, Theodore was nine, laughing at something just off camera, his hair summer-bleached at the tips. Raphael's hand rested on her shoulder. The photographer had asked them to stand closer.

We're already close enough, Raphael had said.

At the time, she had thought it was a kind thing to say.

She was sitting on the edge of the hotel bed in the dark green gown, her hair pinned, when her phone lit with his only message of the evening. Running behind. Go down first.

She did not go down first.

She sat there for twenty-two minutes, because she was not going to walk into a room of three hundred people and spend the night being asked where her husband was. Then she called her sister.

Marcela answered on the second ring.

Tell me you're already in the car.

I'm in the room. He's late.

A pause. He texted you once.

Once.

A longer pause. And Celestine Veil.

Evangelene did not answer that. She hung up, finished the ch*****ne, and went down alone.

The Grand Meridian was the largest private ballroom in the northeastern corridor, and Raphael rented it every year on their anniversary, because — as he liked to tell guests — family deserved the best room in any building. The chandeliers cost more to maintain annually than most people earned. The flowers were flown in. The w**e had been chosen by a sommelier who worked exclusively for the family's catering arm, which was one of the legitimate businesses Evangelene had helped design, a decade ago, when nobody would rent office space to a name like Draven.

She thought about that while she stood at the far end of the floral arrangements, holding a glass she had not yet touched, eleven minutes into waiting.

Then the doors opened, and the room turned.

Raphael Draven came through the threshold the way he did everything — slowly, deliberately, without a single apology anywhere in his face. And at his side, her hand resting in the crook of his elbow, was Celestine Veil.

The room did not gasp. Rooms like this one never did. These were people who had spent years learning to absorb a rupture while keeping their expressions calibrated somewhere between neutral and politely engaged. Politicians did it. Lawyers did it. The senior captains of the family's various arms had been doing it so long it had stopped looking like a skill and started looking like a face.

But there were tells. The nearest cluster of guests — three men who handled freight operations and had worked with the family for years — went silent at exactly the same moment. A woman near the ch*****ne station turned her glass three times without drinking. Petra, the events coordinator, who had run every Draven gala for seven years, appeared at Evangelene's left within thirty seconds, close enough to be useful and far enough to be deniable.

Evangelene noticed all of it.

She noticed, too, that Raphael's hand was not on Celestine's elbow anymore. It had moved to the small of her back — not her arm, not her waist, but the small of her back. The way a man touches a woman when he wants the room to understand the nature of the arrangement.

And she noticed the brooch.

Small. Barely two inches across. Cast in eighteen-karat gold, with a hand-engraved rose dial and a crystal face that had been replaced once, in 1971, when a great-uncle dropped it in a garden. Pinned at the collarbone of a twenty-nine-year-old woman who did not know what the engraving on the back said.

Evangelene's grandmother had called it her traveling compass. She had worn it every day of her adult life, until the day she pressed it into Evangelene's palm six weeks before she died and said, You were the only one who ever asked me what it meant.

Evangelene had kept it in a carved wooden box on her dresser for nineteen years. When Theodore was small, he used to ask to hold it, and she would let him, carefully, and tell him that a compass wasn't only about direction. It was about knowing when you were off course.

Four months ago, she had noticed it was gone. She had gone to her husband and asked where it was.

I had it taken in for restoration, he had said. The mechanism was stiff.

She had believed him. Or she had told herself she did, which was a different thing entirely.

She set her ch*****ne glass down on the nearest flat surface. She said nothing. She did not cross the room. She did not position herself for a confrontation. She stood exactly where she was and watched her husband walk his mistress toward the head table, and watched the subtle repositioning of chairs that would be necessary because someone had to make space.

Marcela arrived without being called. Evangelene understood this when she saw her — standing near the corridor entrance with Theodore, coat still on, having simply walked in, because Marcela had never once in her life waited for permission to enter a room where her sister might need backup.

Then Petra appeared again, and this time she was holding a program card, and her face had gone tight around the mouth.

Mrs. Draven.

Thank you, Petra.

Evangelene took the card.

The family remarks had been moved forward, from nine o'clock to a quarter past eight. And they would not be given by Raphael.

They would be given by Theodore.

Theodore Celli, son of Raphael Draven, will offer brief remarks honoring the organization's legacy and future direction.

She read it twice.

Nobody had told her. Nobody had told Theodore either, she would learn — not until that afternoon, when a folded speech had been handed to an eleven-year-old boy and he had been told to be ready.

Across the ballroom, the compass caught the chandelier light. ....................................
Type '𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓'to view the full story. I’ll 'like' your comment once the link to the full post is published.
If you need to find the full post within the comments section, try this: go to the comments, select 'Most relevant' and switch to 'All comments'—then look for the 'blue text', click on it, and you will be directed to the full post.

Pregnant and Married to a Billionaire, Claire Was Betrayed — He Regretted It When She LeftThe test was still warm in her...
10/14/2026

Pregnant and Married to a Billionaire, Claire Was Betrayed — He Regretted It When She Left

The test was still warm in her hand when she walked into the breakfast room.

Alexander sat at the long table with his tablet propped against the silver coffee pot, reading numbers the way other men read the news. Clare stopped in the doorway. She had rehearsed a sentence in the hallway and lost all of it.

Alexander.

He looked up. What's wrong?

Nothing's wrong. Her smile came apart at the edges. Something wonderful.

She set the test on the table beside his cup and stepped back, as if the small white stick might detonate.

He stared at it. The tablet dimmed and went dark in front of him. Then he looked at her, and she watched it land — the understanding moving across his face slowly, like weather.

Are you serious?

She nodded. The tears she had been holding since six that morning broke loose all at once.

He stood so fast his chair shrieked across the tile. He caught her up, lifted her an inch off the floor — then remembered, and set her down as carefully as a man setting down a full glass.

We're having a baby, he whispered into her hair.

He kissed her forehead. Her cheeks. Her mouth. He cancelled two meetings from the hallway without explaining why, and for the next four hours they sat at that table and talked about names, and paint colors, and whether the child would inherit his terrible singing or her terrible sense of direction. He wanted to teach the baby to swim. He wanted to be at the school gates on the first day. He was not going to be the kind of father who was always somewhere else.

Clare believed him. That was the part she would turn over later, at three in the morning, for years afterward — how completely, how gladly she had believed him.

The first month, he kept his word. He came home for dinner twice a week. He read aloud from a book about pregnancy that he was embarrassed to be seen buying. When she fell asleep on the sofa at nine, he carried her upstairs and did not wake her to tell her he had.

The second month, the company began to expand.

The Singapore deal, he said one night, pulling off his tie in the dark of their bedroom. It's the largest thing we've ever done. Six months, Clare. Then it settles.

She said, Of course.

She meant it. She had watched him build this from a rented office with a broken air conditioner. She knew what it cost him. She brought him tea at midnight and learned not to ask about the flight schedules. She stopped mentioning the doctor's appointments he missed, because mentioning them only made him tired, and making him tired made her feel like a weight.

By the fifth month, the little things were gone.

He no longer asked how she felt. He no longer noticed what she wore. When she called him from the car, laughing and crying at once, to tell him the baby had kicked for the first time, he said, I'm in a meeting, I'll call you back.

He did not call back.

That night she sat on the floor of the nursery with a pair of white socks in her hands. They were so small that her thumb covered them entirely. Alexander had promised to build the crib that weekend. Instead he had left at six for a business dinner and had not texted since.

At eleven she called him.

Are you coming home soon?

I told you. I have a dinner.

I know. I just thought you might be back before midnight. We were supposed to finish the nursery.

A sigh came down the line. Not angry. Worse than angry. Impatient.

Clare. Please. It's a crib. The staff can arrange it.

She looked at the flat-packed wood leaning against the wall, at the instructions still folded in their plastic sleeve, at the two of them he had sketched in the margin of the manual — a stick figure with a screwdriver, a stick figure holding a bottle. He had drawn that in April, laughing.

I wanted us to do it together.

Can we not turn everything into a problem? I'm doing all of this for our family.

She was quiet for a moment. In the background of the call she could hear glasses, and a woman's laugh, bright and unhurried.

All right, she said. Goodnight.

She hung up politely. She had decided, somewhere in the last month, that her child would not be born into a house where every conversation between its parents ended in disappointment.

Vanessa Reed arrived three days later, walking through the foyer beside her husband.

Clare knew her by reputation. Vanessa had known Alexander before Clare — before the company, before the money, back when he was only a clever man with an expensive watch and a rented office. She was elegant in a way that looked effortless and probably wasn't. She had joined one of his advisory projects in the spring.

Hello, Vanessa. It's nice to see you again.

Vanessa's gaze traveled down to Clare's stomach and back up, unhurried.

Clare. You're looking well. A small smile. Motherhood certainly changes a woman's priorities, doesn't it.

I imagine it does.

Alexander was already halfway to his office, talking about a proposal, and did not hear any of it.

After that, Vanessa was everywhere. She stayed late. She took the dinners Clare was too tired to attend. She began to have opinions about the household — the staff, the schedule, the money. And Alexander began to change in a way Clare could not name and could not prove. He grew shorter with her questions. He looked embarrassed when she talked about the baby in front of Vanessa, the way a man looks when someone from his old life reminds him of something he has outgrown.

On a Tuesday afternoon, Clare carried a cup of tea down the hall to his office.

She heard Vanessa through the half-open door.

You're a successful man, Alexander. You have to be careful. People know how much you have, and not everyone who loves you has pure intentions.

Clare isn't like that.

Perhaps not. But have you considered how much her life has changed since she married you? She has everything now. Security. Luxury. A future most women only dream about.

Clare stood in the corridor with the tea going cold in her hands.

I'm only saying you should protect yourself, Vanessa said. Especially now that a child is involved.

Clare pushed the door open with her shoulder.

I brought you tea.

Vanessa smiled as though nothing had been said. How thoughtful.

Clare looked at her husband. She waited — one second, two — for him to ask why her face had changed. He thanked her and went back to his documents.

That night, in the dark, she asked him about it.

He sat up. Are you listening outside my office now?

I wasn't trying to listen. I heard my name. I heard her talking about my intentions.

Vanessa is looking out for the company.

Then why are you suddenly treating me like someone you need protection from?

He set his glass down harder than he needed to.

You're pregnant, Clare. You're emotional. You take everything personally these days.

She stared at him for a long moment. The baby moved, a slow roll under her ribs, as if turning away.

I am carrying our child, she said. I am not losing my mind.

I didn't say you were.

You didn't have to.

Something crossed his face then — regret, or the shadow of it. It lasted a second and lost.

I'm working hard to provide for you and this baby, he said. What more do you want from me?

Her voice came out very soft.

I want my husband. Not your money, not your house, not the cars outside. I want the man who used to sit with me and ask about my day.

He looked away.

I can't spend every hour proving that I love you.

No, she said. But you could spend a few minutes showing me that you remember I'm here.

He said nothing.

The silence lasted for days. ....................................
Type '𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓'to view the full story. I’ll 'like' your comment once the link to the full post is published.
If you need to find the full post within the comments section, try this: go to the comments, select 'Most relevant' and switch to 'All comments'—then look for the 'blue text', click on it, and you will be directed to the full post.

Address

United State
Columbia, MO
MO65203

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Daily Vibe posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share