Chapter 3 - Cracks in the Porcelain
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The sentence followed Ethan all the way back to his estate.
He had built Caldwell Horizon from a rented warehouse outside Chicago into a renewable-energy powerhouse with fourteen hundred employees and international contracts. He could walk into a boardroom of hostile activist investors and know who was bluffing before they opened their mouth.
Yet as he carried his sleeping daughter upstairs that night, he realized he didn't know what happened inside his own home when he was gone.
And he was almost never there.
Two years earlier, his first wife, Emma, had died of an aggressive illness that had taken her in less than three months. Maddie had been two. Their son, Noah, had been a three-month-old infant.
Ethan hadn't known how to process the grief. So he had buried himself in work.
He worked through family dinners. He worked through weekends. He attended birthday parties via video calls from luxury hotel rooms in Tokyo and London.
Then Claire Dalton had entered his life.
She was the daughter of an old family friend—elegant, organized, effortlessly attentive. She remembered Noah's pediatrician appointments. She sent Ethan photographs of Maddie's finger-painting projects.
"You're building a legacy for them," Claire had told him softly over coffee one evening. "Don't feel guilty."
Eighteen months after Emma died, Ethan had married her. Everyone in his social circle said he was blessed.
Standing in Maddie's dimly lit bedroom that night, pulling the soft duvet up to her chin, Ethan wondered if "blessed" was just a word people used for convenient arrangements.
Maddie stirred under the covers, her long lashes fluttering open.
"Daddy?" she whispered.
"I'm right here, Maddie," Ethan said, sitting on the edge of her bed. "I'm not going anywhere."
She looked past his shoulder toward the open bedroom door. "Is Claire sleeping?"
"Yes. She's in our room."
Maddie let out a tiny, shuddering breath and reached out with her bandaged hand to touch his thumb.
May you like
"Can you stay until the sun comes up?" she asked.
Ethan felt a sharp, burning pain in his chest. "I'll stay as long as you want me to."
