Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“Someone’s helping her,” the investigator told him over the phone. “This isn’t a nineteen-year-old covering her tracks. This is infrastructure. Whoever she’s with has resources.”
Reid Jamieson. Senator’s grandson. Old money, political connections, a family that had been making people vanish into the machinery of American power since before the country had a name for it.
Julian paid the investigator. Hired a third.
The third came back empty too.
He stopped eating on the twelfth day. Not a decision. His body simply stopped requesting food. He stood in his penthouse kitchen at two in the morning with the refrigerator open and the light falling on his face and a container of leftover pad thai in his hand, and he put it back and closed the door and stood in the dark.
Sleep was worse. He was sleeping in fragments, twenty-minute stretches that ended with him jerking awake to the phantom scent of clean cotton and something floral, the scent that had been fading from his memory for three weeks and was now more vivid than when she’d been standing in front of him. His brain, deprived of her, was manufacturing her. Filling his sleep with the copper of her hair and the green of her eyes and the image of her face at three fifteen across the terrace, and then filling his waking hours with the other thing. The face she’d worn in the gymnasium doorway when she’d turned and seen him with Dionne, the grief so total it hadn’t resembled grief. It had resembled the end of everything.
Gubat’s board noticed. His CFO sent a carefully worded email about the Southeast Asian numbers. His assistant rescheduled three meetings he’d forgotten and one he’d simply not shown up for. The empire he’d built at twenty, the concrete and code and capital he’d poured over the wound of his father’s indifference, the proof that he couldn’t be discarded, hummed along without him, efficient and indifferent, and the indifference of his own creation felt like a mirror he didn’t want to face.
He faced it anyway. Every night. The bathroom mirror. His mother’s eyes in his own face, and the question that had lived in his chest for sixteen years had a new shape now, a shape that fit the contours of a girl in a green dress who’d walked into her prom alone and held her chin up and then recognized him in the doorway and broken.
Was I not worth finding?
The question had followed him for half his life. Now it reversed itself, turned inside out, because he was the one who’d done the discarding and she was the one who’d vanished and the parallel was so exact it felt like a punishment designed specifically for him.
Power. That was the common thread. He’d had the power to keep her. He’d had her in his hands, literally, her ribs under his palm and her pulse under his mouth and her voice saying his name like a prayer, and he’d chosen to believe a lie instead. Not because the lie was convincing. Because the lie was safe. Because Dionne’s version of Katy, the calculating girl who bragged and schemed and used people, was a girl he could walk away from. And the real Katy, the one who ate lunch alone and said I don’t believe you and touched his face with trembling fingers and asked is this okay, that girl was terrifying, because that girl was honest, and honest people could see you, and being seen was the thing he’d been running from since he was thirteen years old and discovered his name wasn’t real.
The math was inescapable. He became his father. That was the truth he couldn’t outrun. El Diablo had the resources to find his stolen son and chose not to. Julian had the girl who loved him standing three feet away and chose to destroy her. The mechanics were different. The math was the same.
Worse. El Diablo had never pretended to care.
HE WENT TO DIONNE’S office on a Thursday.
Corner office. Twelfth floor. The desk was glass and chrome and the view was Wilshire, and Dionne was sitting behind it in a navy blazer with her dark hair pinned back and a legal brief open in front of her and a coffee cup from the place on the corner that charged nine dollars for a latte. She glanced up when he walked in and smiled, and the smile was the warm, sisterly one, the one that had been in his life for seven years, and for the first time he saw it for what it was.
“Julian.” She stood. “I didn’t know you were coming by. Sit down. Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
The word was cold enough to make her pause. She sat back down. Folded her hands on the desk. Her eyes moved across his face, and he let her read what was there and calculate.