Chapter Ten #2
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.
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.
Only she could lift it.
And she was gone.
God, please.
The words formed in his mind before he could stop them, and he didn't stop them.
He didn't want to stop them. The man who'd spent his entire life politely declining every invitation to faith, who had smiled and redirected and maintained his comfortable distance from the thing that had transformed his father and his brother and the woman he loved, that man was gone.
Dissolved. Left behind in the elevator somewhere between the fifty-second floor and the realization that he was not, in fact, the center of his own universe.
I know I messed up.
Not eloquent. Not the kind of prayer his wife would construct, with its green-highlighted commands and its blue-highlighted references and its earnest, organized devotion.
This was raw. This was a man on a couch in an empty office with his head in his hands, talking to someone he'd spent thirty-one years ignoring.
I know I was too proud.
The pride was the core of it. The pride that said: I will never need anyone.
I will never be broken the way they were broken.
I will build a life so controlled that loss cannot touch me.
And the pride had worked, and the pride had cost him everything, and the cost was a girl in Mary Janes who loved him with a completeness that terrified him, and he'd answered that love by bringing her to a dinner and using her goodness to close a deal.
But I want to believe it's never too late.
He wanted to believe it the way Chelsea believed it, not as a hope but as a fact, a green-highlighted command from a God who didn't make mistakes, who had placed a girl in an elevator and a man behind her and a braid coming undone at the nape of her neck and nine days that were always going to end here, with him on this couch, talking to the ceiling.
I want to believe You're the God of many chances.
Because he needed more than one. He needed a God who looked at a man who'd spent his whole life building walls and said: again. Who looked at the wreckage and said: still. Who looked at the empty room and the cold tea and the capless highlighter and the wife who was gone and said: not yet.
So please.
I'm begging You.
Please, Father—-
A door opened.
His head jerked up, pulse slamming against his ribs, thinking it was his staff, thinking someone finally had news, thinking—-
But the door to his office remained closed.
The sound had come from behind him.
He knew what he'd heard. The soft click of a handle turning, the whisper of hinges, a sound so small that he shouldn't have been able to hear it over the hum of the building and the blood in his own ears, and yet he'd heard it, the way he heard her footsteps, the way he heard everything about her whether he wanted to or not.
"Olivio?"
His body moved before his mind caught up.
He was on his feet and turning with a speed that nearly cost him his balance, and disbelief locked every joint rigid, because Chelsea was standing in the doorway.
Not the office door.
The other doorway. The one that connected his office to the private bedroom adjoining it, the room he'd mentioned to her once, in passing, on their third night, when she'd asked why there was a door behind his bookcase that she'd never seen him open.
She'd been here.
The entire time.
The entire time he'd been pacing this office, calling in favors across two continents, exposing his heart to every person he knew, mobilizing the combined resources of the Cannizzaro and Marchetti networks to search a city of three million people—-
His wife had been twenty feet away, asleep in his bed.
And when he took it all in, her appearance, the mussed hair, the braid half-undone the way it was always half-undone but more so now, as if sleep had finished what her restless hands had started, the rumpled clothes, her eyes swollen and red-rimmed and blinking against the office light with the dazed confusion of someone surfacing from a depth they hadn't planned to reach—-
She was looking at him the way she'd looked at him on Day One. Like he was something she couldn't quite believe was real.
Except this time, her eyes were full of tears.