Chapter 20 #2
Olivero was already moving off his stool at the bar before I got to him.
“What happened?”
I shoved the phone at him as I walked. “Something happened to her.”
He scanned the text, keeping pace easily. “Well…” He frowned. “It does say it’s going too fast. You met her in July, it’s December, and?—”
“No.”
The word came out forcefully enough force to make him look at me
.
“She wouldn’t do this like that,” I said. “Not by text. Not after making me sit in a restaurant like some idiot to be dismissed. She would tell me to my face.” I yanked the door open and stepped out into the cold. “She’s not cruel. And she is absolutely not a coward.”
Olivero followed me toward the car, his expression growing more severe with every word.
“Okay,” he said. “I hear you. But what if?—”
“No. This isn’t her.”
I slid behind the wheel, fury already burning beneath my skin.
“This has Matteo written all over it,” I said. “Some absurd need to test me at exactly the wrong moment.”
Olivero was in the passenger seat by then, phone already in hand.
“Fuck,” I muttered, starting the engine. Then, louder, with the full weight of what was happening settling into place:
“Fuck.”
“We need to call Alessandro,” Olivero said as I backed out of the space.
“I don’t need him.”
“Yes, you do.”
Damn it. Yes, I did.
Olivero made the call and put it on speaker. My father answered on the first ring, knowing Olivero was not the kind of man to call him needlessly.
“What happened?”
“Emily is gone.”
Silence.
Then, “Voluntarily?”
I drove too fast through Boston traffic, one hand clenched around the wheel hard enough that my knuckles hurt.
“No. I got a text from her number. It said she needed space, that it was all too fast, that she was leaving for a while. It isn’t her. It’s wrong. Every word of it is wrong.”
My father did not interrupt me.
A good thing, because if he had tried to soothe me, I might have driven straight through a wall.
“This is the kind of shit Matteo would pull. I swear to God, if?—”
“Don’t do anything stupid.” His voice was calm, clipped, controlled in the way it only ever was when he was already three steps ahead. “Let me speak to Matteo first. I’m fairly sure it isn’t him, but I’ll confirm it. Other than instinct, do you have any reason to think she didn’t write it?”
I threw Olivero an exasperated look.
“No, Dad.” My voice came out sharper than I intended, but I didn’t care. “You’ll have to trust me. She would not leave me like that.”
He exhaled once.
“I believe you.”
“We’ll find out who did this,” he promised. “And then we’ll deal with it.”
I swallowed something hot and violent.
“I’ll kill them all.”
My father was quiet for half a beat.
Then, with maddening composure, “Yes, but not until I get there.”
That should not have helped.
It did.
The next three hours were the longest of my life.
By the time I reached her apartment, I was already past panic and into something colder.
More useful. More dangerous. I paced the length of her living room like a man in a cage while Olivero checked the building cameras, Derek tore through her digital trail, and my father updated me in intervals long enough to torture.
Most of her things were gone.
Not all of them.
That was the problem.
Some clothes. Her passport. A small travel bag. Enough to build a picture, enough to tell a story.
But she left what mattered.
Her laptop was gone, but not the charger. Emily would never have been that absentminded.
And on her nightstand, in the little pink trinket tray, lay the seashell bracelet.
I went still.
Olivero said something behind me, but I barely heard him.
I picked it up carefully, suddenly aware of how breakable it felt in my palm. The uneven shells. The repaired clasp. The tiny imperfect thing Sophie had made with shaking hands and stubborn determination after the accident.
Emily wore it when she was scared. When she missed home. When she needed reminding that fragile things could survive and still be beautiful.
She would never have left without it.
“She didn’t pack,” I said.
Olivero looked at me with enough doubt to make violence briefly appealing.
I picked up the bracelet carefully, suddenly too aware of how breakable it felt in my palm. “The person who packed doesn’t know her. Emily didn’t choose what mattered. Someone chose what looked convincing.”
I looked around the apartment again, at the missing pieces taken with just enough thought to pass at first glance.
“They went to a great deal of effort,” I said quietly. “This wasn’t random.”
My father arrived an hour later.
He came into the apartment in a dark coat still carrying the winter air with him, his face unreadable in the way that meant he was angrier than anyone present should feel comfortable with.
“Well?” I asked.
“It wasn’t Matteo.”
I stared at him.
“He knows she’s important to you,” my father said. “He’s offended by the suggestion, actually.”
I let out a harsh laugh.
“How touching.”
My father ignored that.
“He swore it wasn’t him, and in this case I believe him.”
I turned away before the fury on my face could become disrespect.
Not Matteo.
In a way, that was worse.
Matteo would at least have made sense, and Matteo wouldn’t have hurt her.
Derek arrived not long after that with video footage and his laptop under one arm, looking much too pleased with himself for a man stepping into the center of my personal hell.
“I found something.”
He brought up the footage on the screen.
Emily.
At the bus station.
A hood up, a bag over her shoulder, head down, walking with quick purpose toward the departure gates.
Olivero swore softly.
My father watched the screen in silence.
“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,” he said at last, “then at some point you have to consider it may in fact be a duck.”
I turned to look at him slowly.
“No,” I said, voice far too calm.
That was how they all knew I was getting worse.
“No, this is not a duck. This is a fucking zebra.”
Neither man said anything.
I knew I was right.
It was in the angle of her shoulders, too tense. The speed of her walk, fractionally off. The way the bag sat wrong on her frame. And more than any of that, it was in the certainty living under my skin like a second pulse.
This had to do with me.
With my life.
With the world I had brought her toward while convincing myself I could keep the damage contained if I loved her carefully enough.
Now I was standing in her apartment, holding a worthless bracelet more valuable than anything in the room, staring at doctored evidence of her disappearance, and for the first time I could no longer dress the truth up as strategy or timing or unfortunate complications.
I was looking straight at the danger of having Emily in my life.
And my spectacular, unforgivable inability to keep her safe.
I turned the bracelet once between my fingers, steadying myself on the small, breakable thing that never left her wrist by accident.
“Stay strong, sweetheart,” I said, more to the empty room than to myself. “I’m on my way.”
Then I slipped it into my pocket and let the rest of me go cold.
Whoever had done this had just made the most expensive mistake of their life.