Chapter 6
Damien Corwin had been feeling like a stone had been weighing down his chest.
The child had recovered, but Callista hadn’t contacted him for a long time. He couldn’t shake the image of her that day in the villa -her pale face, trembling fingers, and that faint whisper. “Let’s get divorced.”
Now that some time had passed, he figured she must have calmed down completely.
He took out his phone and instinctively dialed the number he knew by heart.
“We’re sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
The cold, robotic voice made his heart jolt.
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Her WhatsApp avatar had gone black. The message he sent returned with a glaring red exclamation mark.
“Callista?” he muttered, his fingers trembling uncontrollably.
They had been married for so many years. Even when she was upset, she had never blocked him.
He drove to the office. “Where’s Mrs.Corwin?”
Everyone in the office looked at each other in confusion.“Mrs. Corwin? She quit a while ago…”
Damien staggered upstairs and saw a stranger slamming the desk, yelling,
“Useless! Mr.Corwin put me in charge of you
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idiots!”
“You’re all getting paid to do nothing. What’s the point of keeping you?”
Damien’s voice turned icy. “Who the hell are you?”
The man immediately tried to butter him up. “Mr.Corwin, I’m Delphine’s cousin.”
Damien suddenly remembered Delphine Wynter had mentioned wanting to find her cousin a job a while back.
His vision went black. He flipped the desk in front of him.“Get out!”
The cousin’s face darkened, and he quickly scurried away.
Back at the villa, Delphine Wynter was
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leisurely painting her nails while two nannies paced back and forth with the baby.
“Delphine, what’s the deal with your cousin?” Damien asked, tugging at his tie in frustration.
Delphine’s eyes filled with tears instantly.“Damien, I’m sorry. He kept pestering me for a job, and said he’d hit me if I didn’t help. I didn’t have a choice…”
Damien waved her off irritably. “Enough. Don’t ever bring strays like that around again.”
That nagging unease in his chest was growing stronger. He pressed a hand to his heart instinctively.
He rushed to the villa in the suburbs. He knocked on the door for a long time–no
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answer. He keyed in the code and stepped inside.
The house was eerily quiet. Dust coated the coffee table, and the vegetables in the kitchen had rotted and begun to stink.
He stood in the middle of the living room, suddenly short of breath.
Then, the doorbell rang.
The delivery guy handed him an old, yellowed postcard–one they had written together ten years ago in Asheville. Callista had smiled and said she wanted to send it to her future self.
He bolted outside and called his
assistant.“Where the hell is she? She’s been gone this long and no one noticed?!”
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The assistant sounded timid and
aggrieved.“Mrs. Corwin didn’t let anyone near the villa. She told us not to disturb her. We have no idea where she went…
“Find her! Turn all of New York upside down if you have to!” he shouted into the phone.
Soon after, someone brought him a necklace found by a passerby.
Damien staggered back two steps. It was Callista’s necklace–she never took it off. Inside the pendant was their wedding photo..
In the days that followed, he searched every place she might’ve gone–cafés, bookstores, flower shops, art galleries… She was nowhere.
He grew thinner by the day. The reflection in the mirror showed sunken eyes and a
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)
scruffy beard. The stack of documents from his assistant grew higher and higher, but he didn’t even have the strength to flip them
open.
Late at night, he often sat alone in their old bedroom, staring at her photo.
“Callista,” he whispered into the darkness. “Where are you…
Sometimes he’d wake from dreams,
convinced he had heard her voice. But when he opened his eyes, there was only the emptiness of night.
His phone screen remained frozen on her contact page, but every call ended with that same cold, automated message.
“Mr.Corwin, you really should rest,” his assistant urged again and again with
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concern.
But he only shook his head and picked up his car keys again.
“I’ll go look one more time. Maybe I’ll find her today.”
