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 picked up the highlighter.
Green. Her color for commands. The things God told you to do.
He held it, and the weight of it, nothing, a few grams, a plastic tube with a felt tip, was unbearable.
Because it was hers, and she was gone, and the room was full of her and empty of her at the same time, and he stood in the wreckage of his own making and understood, with the clarity of a man who'd spent his life avoiding exactly this, what it was to love someone and lose them.
Not the way his father had lost Paulette. Not to death. Not to something that couldn't be fought or undone.
He'd lost her to himself.
To the part of him that calculated utility while she slept against his shoulder. To the part that saw the Marquez dinner as an opportunity and brought her there knowing she'd be herself, and used the very thing that made her extraordinary, and carried the guilt of it like something swallowed that wouldn't go down.
To the mask.
The mask that was dissolving now, here, in an empty room that smelled faintly of chamomile and highlighter ink, while somewhere in this city the woman he loved was walking away from him on a leg that would be hurting more than usual, carrying a quilted Bible case and a shattered heart and the unshakable faith that God had a plan even when the plan felt like it was killing her.
The green highlighter sat in his palm.
And Olivio Cannizzaro, who didn't need anyone, who'd built an empire on the principle that control was the only thing that couldn't leave, stood in the room where his wife had been, surrounded by the evidence of her presence and the fact of her absence, and understood, for the first time in his life, what it meant to be the one who stayed.
Because that was the thing he'd gotten wrong.
The person who left didn't just stop hurting. The person who left took the warmth and the voice and the scattered, bright, constantly-in-motion presence that turned empty rooms into places where someone lived.
Chelsea had taken all of it.
And what was left was a man standing in a room full of ghosts, holding a green highlighter, and the silence was so complete that he could hear, distantly, the sound of his own heart beating, and it sounded nothing like control.
It sounded like her name.
Chapter Ten
HE CALLED ADRIANO FIRST.
Not because Adriano was closest. Because Adriano was the one person who would hear the thing Olivio was about to say and not flinch, not lecture, not pause with the heaviness of a man weighing whether his son had finally broken. Adriano Kontides was a lawyer and a friend and a man who'd once destroyed his own marriage and rebuilt it with his bare hands, and if anyone was going to understand what Olivio needed right now, it was him.
The phone rang twice.
Olivio stood at the window of his office, the same window where he'd stood on Day Eight while Chelsea made tea in the apartment below, the same view of Toronto's skyline that used to look like competence and now looked like a city full of places where his wife could disappear. The glass threw his reflection back at him: a man in a suit, standing in a corner office on the fifty-second floor of a building with his name on it, and none of it could tell him where she was.
"Olivio." Adriano's voice was even, controlled, the voice of a man who'd spent twenty years in courtrooms learning that the first person to rush was the first person to lose.
"Is she with you?"
A pause.
And the pause was wrong. It wasn't the pause of a man who didn't know what Olivio was talking about. It was the pause of a man choosing his words, and the choosing was itself an answer, and Olivio's hand tightened on the phone until the edges bit into his palm.
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm not lying. She's not with us." Another pause. "But Shayla's been trying to reach her for the past hour. Olivio, what happened?"
The question was simple. The answer was not.
Olivio closed his eyes. Beyond the glass, a crane was moving on the Yorkville site, steel and cable swinging against the pale sky with the mechanical patience of something that didn't care about the chaos happening fifty-two floors above it.
"I made a mistake." The words came out harder than he intended. Wrong shape. Too small for the thing they were trying to hold. "She thinks I stayed married to her to close a deal."
"The Marquez property."
Of course Adriano knew. That was what happened when your closest friend was a man who read contracts the way other people read novels and who'd been watching Olivio's marriage with the attention of someone who recognized the early symptoms of a disease he'd survived.