Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44860 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 150(@300wpm)
Until now.
Until a girl with a limp and a Bible and a chipped white mug had walked out of his building, and every system he'd built couldn't tell him where she was.
He called his father.
Miguel answered on the first ring, and the sound of his voice, firm, unsurprised, carrying the weight of a man who'd been expecting exactly this call at exactly this moment, did something to the last remaining wall inside Olivio.
"I know you already know what's happening." His voice came out rougher than he intended. "You have eyes everywhere."
A pause. Then his father, gently: "Tell me anyway."
And the gentleness was worse than anything else. Worse than Adriano's directness, worse than Aivan's recognition, worse than the efficient competence of Giancarlo's response. Because his father's gentleness was the gentleness of a man who'd waited fifteen years to hear his son ask for something real.
"I need help finding her."
"Finding who?"
The question was not a question. It was an offering. A door held open.
"Don't, Father." Olivio gritted out. "You know who I'm talking about."
"I do. But I want to hear you say it."
Olivio's free hand closed into a fist against his thigh. The skyline blurred beyond the glass. Somewhere out there, in a city of three million people, his wife was walking on a leg that would be hurting, carrying a quilted Bible case and the wreckage of a trust he'd spent nine days earning and one afternoon destroying.
"Chelsea. My wife. She's gone, she left, and I don't know where, and my security team is useless, and Adriano's people haven't found anything, and I've called in every favor I have, and she's—-" He stopped. Breathed. "She's given me the slip. I honestly don't know how. Maybe God told her how."
He heard his father's breath catch. Not at the desperation. At the word.
God.
Olivio Cannizzaro, who'd spent his entire adult life politely declining his family's invitations to faith, had just invoked the name of God in a sentence that wasn't casual and wasn't performative and wasn't a figure of speech. It was the involuntary appeal of a man who'd run out of his own resources and was reaching for the only one left.
His father was quiet for a long moment.
"Why are you doing all of this, son?"
And there it was.
Not the question he expected. Not where did she go or what did you do or how do we fix this. The question underneath all the other questions. The one his father had been waiting thirty-one years to hear him answer.
"Why are you asking me that now?"
"Because I've been waiting to ask you since the day Edgar called and told me you were married." His father's voice was even. "And I've been waiting for you to have the answer."
The office was silent except for the hum of the ventilation system and the distant sound of the city below, and Olivio stood in that silence and the last piece of the thing he'd been fighting dissolved, not with a crash, not with a surrender, but with the quiet, exhausted relief of a man who'd been holding a door shut for thirty-one years and had just realized that the thing on the other side was not the enemy.
"I love her, Father."
His voice broke on the word. Not Father as formality. Not Father as distance. Father the way a son said it when he had nothing left to hide behind, when the word was no longer a title but a plea, and the plea was not for help but for witness. He needed someone to hear him say it. He needed the man who'd survived his own version of this to hear him say it.
"I love her."
The line was quiet, and in the quiet, Olivio could hear, or imagined he could hear, the sound of his father's breathing changing. Not surprise. Something older than surprise. Something that had been waiting.
"Then we will find her." His father's voice was thick. "Call me if you hear anything. And Olivio—-"
"Yes."
"Thank you for telling me."
The line went dead, and Olivio lowered the phone.
Each call had cost him more than the last, and each one had taken him further from the man he'd been that morning—-the man who sat at his desk reading a book and told himself it was a courtesy. Adriano had heard him admit to a mistake. Aivan had heard his voice break. Giancarlo had heard him ask for help. And Miguel had heard him say the words he'd spent thirty-one years building walls to avoid.
Four calls. Four walls down. And still nothing.
He paced.
The length of his office, twenty-two steps from the window to the door, he'd never counted before and now he counted, and back. The couch. The desk. The view. Twenty-two steps. The conference room through the glass wall, where the artwork cycled on the screen the way it had on Day One, and he could see the ghost of her sitting there with her Bible case, waiting, patient, uncertain, not knowing yet what she was walking into.