Page 37 of The Vows He Buried
“I came here to tell you something,” I said, my voice steady. “I came here to tell you that I’m letting it go.”
He looked at me, confused. “Letting what go?”
“All of it,” I said. “The anger. The resentment. The hate. For three years, it was my constant companion. And for the last few months, it’s been my fuel. It helped me fight. It helped me survive. But I can’t take it with me to Florence. It’s too heavy. It’s the last chain connecting me to this place, to you.”
I took a step closer, my voice dropping to a near whisper. “I don’t love you anymore, Maddox. I haven’t for a very long time. And I realized today that I no longer need to hate you, either.”
I looked into his eyes, and I gave him the only gift I had left to give. The gift of my own freedom, which would, in turn, become his.
“That’s freedom,” I said. “Not just for me. But for you, too. You don’t have to be the villain of my story anymore. You can just be a man I used to know. And I can just be a woman who is ready to start her new life.”
He stared at me, his eyes swimming with tears. He understood. He understood the magnitude of what I was offering him. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was something far more powerful. It was release.
He nodded slowly, a single tear tracing a path down his cheek. “Thank you,” he whispered, his voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t name.
There was nothing left to say. I had closed the book.
I turned and walked towards the door, my footsteps echoing in the vast, empty house.
“Savannah?” he called out, his voice stopping me at the threshold.
I turned back. He was still standing in the same spot, a solitary figure in the gloom.
“Be happy,” he said. It was a plea, a prayer, a final, selfless wish.
“I will be,” I replied. And for the first time, I knew it was true.
The next day, I was at the airport. I traveled light, with a single suitcase and a portfolio of my designs. My past was packed away. My future was waiting.
As I walked down the jet bridge, I didn’t look back. I looked forward, through the window of the plane, at the open sky. The engines whined, a sound of pure, limitless potential.
The vows I had made to him, the promises of a life that had turned into a prison, were ash. The vows I had made to myself, the promises of a life I would build with my own two hands, were everything.
I buried the vows,I thought, as the plane began to accelerate down the runway, pressing me back into my seat.Now I rise for myself.
Chapter 25: The Mother's Game
Florence was a city of light and rebirth, and I had steeped myself in its magic. The weeks since my arrival had been a renaissance of my own soul. The Heirloom Reclaimed atelier, housed in the sun-drenched, 16th-century palazzo Lucian had provided, was a vibrant sanctuary of creation. The air smelled not of dust and decay, but of Italian coffee, expensive silk, and the limitless potential of a new beginning. My days were filled with the satisfying scratch of charcoal on paper, the drape of fabric on a mannequin, and the collaborative energy of my small, brilliant team of artisans.
I was healing. The ghosts of New York, the specter of the Vale mansion, the hollow ache of my past—they were all beginning to feel like a story I had read about someone else. My father’s memory was a gentle, guiding presence, not a source of pain. My final conversation with Maddox had been a true release, a cauterizing of the final wound. I was free.
The launch of our first capsule collection was just days away, an intimate showing for Europe’s most influential fashion editors and buyers, to be held in the palazzo’s private courtyard. The pieces were the best work of my life, each garment a testament to the woman I had become: strong, resilient, and unapologetically complex.
It was in this state of fragile, hard-won peace that the past came roaring back, a final, venomous ghost refusing to be exorcised.
I was in the main studio, the afternoon sun casting long shadows across the terracotta floor, when Harper’s face appeared on my laptop screen, her expression a mask of grim fury.
“She’s not done, Vannah,” Harper said without preamble. “The old bitch has one last card to play.”
The news unfolded on a dozen screens before me. Evelyn Vale, released on a technicality and under house arrest in a secondary property while awaiting her federal trial, had declared war. She held a press conference from the manicured lawns of her gilded cage, flanked by a new, notoriously ruthless legal team.
I watched the livestream, a strange, detached calm settling over me. Evelyn stood at a podium, a portrait of wronged, aristocratic motherhood. She was thinner, harder, her eyes glittering with a desperate, reptilian fury. She was a cornered animal, and she was lashing out with everything she had left.
“For weeks, my family and I have been the victims of a vicious, calculated smear campaign,” she began, her voice trembling with manufactured emotion. “A campaign orchestrated by a deeply disturbed and vengeful young woman, my former daughter-in-law, Savannah Blake.”
She painted a masterpiece of lies. She accused me of corporate espionage, of stealing proprietary documents from Vale Global—the very documents Lucian had given me—to ruin the company out of personal spite after Maddox had ended our “troubled marriage.” She claimed I had fabricated the story of my miscarriage, that I had a history of emotional instability, that I had manipulated her son and her family from the very beginning.
“This was never a real marriage,” Evelyn declared, her voice ringing with false sincerity. “It was a deception, orchestrated by Ms. Blake to gain access to our family’s resources. When my son,Maddox, finally found the strength to end the toxic relationship, she retaliated with this campaign of lies.”
