Chapter 21
Laurent
The car slowed, and I peered out the window toward her apartment. The light was on. I’d thought she was sick, or just needed time to herself, but each day she didn’t show up made me more suspicious. When she stopped calling in to Evelyn, irritation turned to unease.
Garrett parked the car, and I pulled the handle to open the door.
“Good luck,” he said, glancing back at me.
I ignored him. I didn’t need luck—only meticulous planning.
At her door, I smoothed back my hair and checked my tie before knocking.
I waited.
And waited.
I was about to knock again when I heard movement.
The door opened, and I was ready to unleash every pent-up accusation—until I found myself staring at a chestnut-haired man in his thirties.
“Who are you?” I growled.
He frowned. “I should be asking you that, mate. You’re the one knocking on my door.”
“Your door?” I checked the number. No mistake.
“I’m looking for Lucia Hart,” I said, but a cold sweat prickled as her words came back to me—something about running and hiding. The system.
Fuck.
Why hadn’t I paid attention?
“Hold on,” he said, shutting the door in my face.
A moment later, he reopened it and handed me a bundle of letters.
“She doesn’t live here anymore. I do. When you find her, give her those.”
The door slammed shut again.
I stared down at the envelopes.
Each one bore her name.
I looked up at the wooden door, heart pounding.
She was gone.
My feet felt heavy on each stone step. At the bottom, I turned and looked back at the building.
Within ten days she’d cleared the apartment, and it was already tenanted again. It was obvious now—she’d been planning this for much longer.
I crushed the letters in my fist as I walked down the path. She was two months into her first trimester.
Seven months remaining.
Seven months to find them.
When I sat in the car, Garrett wisely stayed silent.
?? ?? ??
Allison and Evelyn closed ranks on me. When I went through their email correspondence, it became clear they were loyal to Lucia—but neither of them had heard from her. It was as if she’d vanished into thin air.
Allison remained professional, but I could feel the animosity oozing from every exchange. She didn’t hold back with her name-calling in the emails, either. The woman had an overactive imagination.
I might manipulate and coerce, but I wasn’t a murderer.
Those two women needed help.
But I needed professional help.
?? ?? ??
I signed the contract with my usual detachment: neat black type, discreet clauses, and an hourly rate that would have fed a small country.
The PI firm smelled faintly of stale espresso and expensive solutions.
They shook my hand with practised solemnity, promised discretion, and placed a slim folder on my desk as if it were a sacred object.
“We’ll run everything,” the lead investigator said.
“Data feeds, CCTV sweeps, transactional analysis, social media forensics. We’ll find patterns.
” He slid a printed invoice across the wood.
The number glanced at me like a consolation prize: it would cost more than most people’s annual mortgages.
Fine. Money fixed things. Money always did.
They began with the obvious—phone records, last-known transactions, travel manifests.
They asked for access that I had to grant, signatures that I signed, and permission that I’d grant without thinking.
I provided them with bank receipts and screenshots; I even let them review my accounts, my assistants’ calendars, and the building’s security logs.
It felt clinical and efficient. That was the point.
Two days in, the reports came back with a ribbon of hope: a courier receipt from a Spanish post office, stamped and faint, a tracking number that could place a device in Malaga. My chest punched the air. Finally, proof. I called the lead. He was measured, cautious.
“It’s small,” he warned. “Freight can be rerouted, mislabelled. We’ll dig deeper.”
They dug. They paid for backend checks and ticket searches.
They spoke to a sleepy clerk in a coastal depot who remembered a thick envelope marked for ‘repair’.
The PI forwarded the scanned signature with a triumphant flourish.
My calendar evaporated; I booked flights, had lawyers on standby, and assembled a small team of my own people ready to fly.
Then the trail blurred.
One of the junior operatives came to me in the meeting room like a man carrying bad weather.
“We traced the posting point to a mailbox that’s used by dozens of people,” he said.
“It’s a clever drop. Whoever did this knew how to avoid fingerprints and cameras.
The shop’s CCTV failed that day. There’s no way to positively identify the sender. ”
I felt the first, small, terrible thing: a tightening in my throat I could not control.
The PI reassured me—there were still angles, financial trails, taxi logs.
Hours became days. Each new possible lead consumed money; each dead end polished my irritation into something colder.
My team called with updates; my assistant rang three times before I picked up.
I grilled every detail until the reporters’ names started to haunt the margins of my notebooks.
Weeks passed. One night, the PI sent an encrypted file: a blurry photo of a woman who might have been Lucia, caught on a wet street camera, head down beneath a hood.
The analysts overlaid timestamps and cross-referenced store card purchases.
It looked promising—until CCTV from a neighbouring angle revealed the woman’s profile did not match.
It was a dead ringer for the grainy hope of a man’s sanity: almost right, not right enough.
Money began to feel useless. The PIs offered more options: a flaky mole in a repair shop in Spain who’d keep an eye out for packages, a surveillance sweep that required permission from landlords, which could take months to obtain, and an overseas consultancy that promised in-the-field access for a retainer that could sustain a city.
I authorised retainer after retainer because authorising was action and action was sanity.
One evening, I found myself in the office past midnight, the city a patchwork of lights beneath the blinds. Receipts lay like small confessions across my desk. The lead investigator rang.
“Sir,” he said, voice low. “We’ve exhausted the easy avenues.”
The words were a report, a bill, and a verdict all at once. I hadn’t expected a verdict. I’d expected traction.
“Then find me the hard avenues,” I said, and the sentence came out brittle, too loud even on my own phone. My jaw throbbed. “Find her.”
“We’ll continue,” he promised. “But you should prepare for expense, and for time.”
Prepare. The word landed like a colder weather front. Time. Expense. The quiet was something else now. I couldn’t repair with money alone.
I stared at the invoices and then at the photo of the pregnancy test—the small thing under the paper towel I had thrown away in my mind as soon as she left. The image, the silence, the absence—proof that one life could be managed with contracts, but never another person’s will.
I had poured money into solutions until I’d convinced myself that doors could be bought open.
The doors did not budge. The professionals I hired had found everything except the one thing I wanted: lucidity.
The realisation was a slow fracture, and the fracture opened with a sound like a man clearing his throat before a speech he could not remember how to give.
?? ?? ??
Weeks turned into months, but I couldn't stop. I called the lead back and spoke in a voice that tried to be composed but found the raw edges instead.
“Keep looking,” I said. “Don’t stop. And—” I swallowed, because another word had to mean more than money. “If you find her, don't approach her. She’ll be heavily pregnant.”
There was a beat of silence, the professional kind that kept contracts intact. “Understood, sir.”
I hung up and stared at my phone.
Outside the building, the city pulsed on, indifferent. Inside, the folder of invoices gleamed on my desk like a tally of my diminishing certainty. I was used to owning outcomes. It had never been like this.
The pain of her absence never dulled.