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)
He'd called Adriano, Aivan, Giancarlo, his father. He had his own security team sweeping every public transit route, every taxi dispatch, every hotel lobby. He had Kelly making calls to Chelsea's rehabilitation contacts. He had Edgar, who was already driving through the city in a state of controlled anguish, checking every place that had ever meant anything to a girl who'd been asleep for most of her life and awake for so little of it that the list of places she might go was painfully short.
He'd even called Kazeyuki.
The thought of it still burned. Calling the man whose hands knew his wife's body in ways that were professional and gentle and healing—-everything Olivio's hands had been in those nine mornings and then unmade in a single afternoon. But he'd swallowed the jealousy and made the call anyway, because she might have gone to someone who made her feel safe, and Kazeyuki was kind, and Kazeyuki was her doctor, and if Chelsea had run to the one man who knew how to put broken things back together instead of the one who'd broken them—-
Kazeyuki hadn't heard from her. But the concern in his voice had been real, and he'd promised to call if she reached out, and Olivio had thanked him and hung up and stood at his window and thought: This is what you've become. A man who calls the men he was jealous of and thanks them for caring about the woman he was too proud to love properly.
And still nothing.
No sighting. No phone activity. No credit card transactions. His wife, who couldn't cross a lobby without leaving an impression on every person in it, had somehow become invisible.
He was standing at his window, and the city below was going dark, and she was out there somewhere, behind one of those millions of windows or walking between them or sitting on a bench with her quilted case and her shattered trust, and he couldn't reach her.
Because you're not in control, son.
The voice was not his.
It arrived the way the presence had arrived that morning, in the margins of the book, not loud, not insistent, not the kind of voice that demanded acknowledgment. It was simply there. As if someone had been standing in the room the entire time, watching him pace, watching him make calls, watching him dismantle the empire of his own self-sufficiency one phone call at a time, and had waited until the dismantling was complete to speak.
Olivio sank onto the couch.
Not the way he normally sat. He dropped. The leather received him without comment, and he sat there with his elbows on his knees and his hands gripping the sides of his head and his eyes squeezed shut, and the city hummed beyond the glass, indifferent.
A thousand possibilities crossed his mind. The street. A bus. A hospital, had her leg given out, had she collapsed, was she somewhere in pain and alone, was she—-
No.
He couldn't go there.
But he couldn't stop going there, either, because the thing about losing control was that once it was gone, the mind did what it wanted, and what his mind wanted was to show him every scenario in which Chelsea was hurt and he wasn't there, and the scenarios were vivid and merciless and they wouldn't stop.
His phone sat silent on the cushion beside him.
Nothing from Adriano's network or Aivan's contacts or Giancarlo's people or his own security or Edgar's desperate search or Kazeyuki's clinic. Nothing.
She was gone.
And the thought of losing her, not for an afternoon but permanently, the way his family lost people, the way Paulette had been lost and the loss had turned his father into a ghost and Aivan into stone, the thought of that made it impossible to breathe, and this time, he didn't recoil from the impossibility. This time, he didn't reach for a framework or a rationalization or the familiar armor of precious is not the same as necessary.
This time, all he wanted was to stay inside the feeling.
Because the feeling was her.
The feeling was nine days of waking up with her warmth against him and falling asleep with her hand on his chest. Coffee in a chipped white mug. Colored highlighters. A breakfast table she set herself every morning because she wanted to. I love—-I mean, I'll see you tonight. A book with colored tabs. I want you to go to Heaven. The absolute, annihilating tenderness of a woman who asked for nothing except that the man she loved would exist forever.
He'd had that.
He'd had all of it.
And he'd held it in his hands and calculated its utility, and the calculation was the cruelest thing he'd ever done, crueler than anything Aivan had done to Sienah in ten years of neglect, because Aivan hadn't known what he had. Olivio had known. He'd known, and he'd used it anyway, and the knowledge of that was a weight that no amount of pacing or phone calls or twenty-three-million-dollar sacrifices could lift.