Her Regret Came Too Late Chapter 07

Her Regret Came Too Late Chapter 07

One day, I saw a news headline that stopped me cold.

“Victoria Clark nearly jumped off Dragon’s Peak. Luckily, her assistant intervenes.”

I stared at the photo for a long time. She was on her knees at the edge of the cliff, her body bent forward, her face hidden in her hands. The wind blew her hair across her face.

I felt nothing.

Not hatred. Not satisfaction. Not even a flicker of the old pain.

Just a strange, quiet stillness.

I thought maybe her regret was real. Maybe she truly suffered.

But so what?

She and I were nothing to each other now. The thread had been cut. The bridge had been burned. The man she was crying over didn’t exist anymore.

I closed the browser, locked the phone and put it in my drawer.

Then I went back to the workbench, where Callie was waiting with a crooked wooden bridge that kept falling over.

“Mr. Clark, look! The bridge is going to fall!”

Callie’s voice was high with panic. She was holding up her little wooden bridge with both hands, and sure enough, one side was sagging.

“Don’t worry,” I said, crouching down beside her. “We just need to make the support thicker here.”

I picked up a thin piece of wood and started carving. My knife moved in small, careful strokes. Callie

watched me with those big brown eyes, her lips pressed together in concentration.

Ariel walked in while I was gluing the support to the bridge’s base. She set a folder on my desk but didn’t say anything right away. She just stood there, watching us work.

W

off to find more wood, Ariel pulled up a chair and sat down.

at this,” she said, nodding toward the folder.

glue bottle and opened it. Inside was an application form. New Emerging Architect

Sponsored by the most respected architecture magazine in the country.
not entering,” I said, closing the folder.

“Why not?”

“I just… I’m fine the way I am.”

Ariel didn’t take the folder back. She pushed it closer to me with one finger.

“The models you make,” she said quietly, “every single one has a soul. Don’t you think they deserve to be

seen by more people?”

I turned away and started organizing my tool cabinet, lining up the carving knives by size. My shoulders felt tight.

“It’s not about fame,” Ariel said, her voice soft. “It’s about you. You told me once that you studied architecture because you wanted to stand on a stage. You told me about staying up three nights in college for one design project. You won first place in the whole department. You said that was when you knew- architecture was the thing you wanted to do more than anything else in the world.”

My hand stopped on a knife handle.

I didn’t turn around. But my shoulders tightened even more.

Ariel kept going. “The models you make now-Callie loves them. All the children love them. But don’t you think you could build something bigger? Not houses. Not shopping malls. The kind of buildings you actually

want to build.”

I finally turned around.

“Callie says she wants to be an architect when she grows up.” Ariel smiled. “Don’t you want to be an example for her? So she knows what a real architect looks like?”

Those words landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.

I thought about myself as a child. The first time I saw a photograph of a lighthouse in a magazine. The way the light had pulled at something inside me. The way my heart had raced when I flipped through architecture books in the university library. The way my professor had said my graduation project had

warmth.

I stood there for a long time. So long that Ariel started to shift in her chair, probably thinking I wasn’t going

to answer.

Then I walked over, picked up the folder, and opened it again.

“I’ll try,” I said.

That night, the workshop light stayed on very late.

I sat at my desk with a blank piece of paper in front of me. My pencil hovered above it. I couldn’t move.

want to build?

Thought about the past year. Thought about falling. Thought about drowning. Thought alled into that small boat in the dark.

pened my eyes and started to draw.

e pencil scratched across the paper. A shape began to take form-not a house, not a bridge. Something

else.

The building rose from the ground like a pair of curved leaves, opening toward the sky. In the center was a circular light court. Light poured down from above, filling the space from every angle.

I wrote the design statement at the bottom of the page: “This building is for everyone who has lived

through their darkest hour. When you stand in the light court, you will understand-every ending is also a beginning.”

I named it Rebirth.

Three months later, I received an envelope. Inside was a letter.

“Congratulations. You have won the Gold Award of the New Emerging Architect Competition.”

I stared at the words for a long time.

My hands started to shake from something I hadn’t felt in years.

Pride.

The magazine published my design and the judges’ comments. I had used a pseudonym-Lucien Ortiz. A name no one had ever heard of. A name that meant nothing to anyone.

But the design spoke for itself. Architecture critics called it “a meditation on survival” and “the most emotionally powerful entry in a decade.”

Lucien Ortiz became a small mystery in the architecture world. People wondered who he was. But no one connected him to Lambert Clark. To the world, Lambert Clark was dead.

I thought I could live like this forever. Quiet. Invisible. Free.

But my past wouldn’t let me be.

One afternoon, the door flew open with a kick.

The bang was so loud that the children screamed. I was helping a boy glue the wing of his airplane model. My hand jerked. Glue squirted onto my fingers.

When I looked up, Dillan was standing in the doorway.

He looked terrible. His cheekbones stuck out. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. His black jacket was wrinkled. There were mud stains on his pants. The confident, golden boy of the Clark family now looked like a stray dog.

w you weren’t dead, Lambert,” he said. His voice scraped like sandpaper on glass. “Hiding here? And

wards?”

quickly and stepped in front of the children. “Dillan. How did you find me?”