Wife's Bitter Revenge Against Neglectful CEO Husband-Chapter 126: Disappearance

The mountain cabin was the best purchase I had ever made. It is what I should have done the moment I escaped the Heavenly household. Nothing that happened afterward would have happened had I made a beeline for the wilderness.

I sat on the porch looking out over the treetops. The morning fog was slow to dissipate, but it would in another hour or so.

The sherpa-lined blanket slipped from my shoulder as I took a sip of the steaming hot coca that kept my hands warm. I spent a lot of time these days trying to stay warm. At least here, I had an external reason for the chill. It was better than obsessing with my shriveled heart. It was a waiting game for the remainder of the organ to stop beating. It shouldn’t be long now that I had walked away from Alec.

The fire gutted the apartment building. I heard King bought the building and had it razed before Lettie’s case went to trial.

Both Lettie and Daniel died in prison. I suspected Eugene had something to do with it, but I had no proof. To be fair, Lettie and Daniel had hurt a lot of people, which meant they had a lot of enemies. Plus, prisoners didn’t particularly care for offenders who committed crimes against kids. Their unnatural deaths could have been orchestrated in a dozen different ways by any of a hundred suspects.

How they died didn’t matter to me as long as they were gone.

Anya wasn’t so lucky. It was her scream I heard after I was locked in the room with Bea. Lettie pushed her down the stairs because Anya had lied about the pregnancy. Anya was paralyzed from the neck down now. She was also divorced and living with her parents again.

Karma was a bitch, wasn’t it?

An autopsy revealed Bea was poisoned long before Lettie scheduled the meet. I never had a chance to save my friend. Her fate was sealed as soon as Lettie got her hands on Bea. Not that Stiff cared. It was still my fault for loving the wrong man.

The last time I saw him was at Bea’s funeral. He went off on me in the funeral home and insisted I leave. I didn’t blame him. After all, her death was my fault. Even so, it hurt. I wasn’t welcome to mourn with our mutual friends, and if it was a choice between me receiving their support and Stiff receiving it, I chose Stiff, so I left.

I walked out of the funeral home and kept walking. When my phone wouldn’t stop ringing, I tossed it in a sewage grate. When I was tired of walking, I rented a car and drove in no particular direction. It wasn’t until I needed gas that I realized I was on the same road Alec had taken during our camping trip.

I wondered if I could find peace once more in the mountains. At least I couldn’t hurt anyone else if I avoided everyone.

I was pretty good at avoiding people. Once I’d purchased the cabin and an SUV, I made it a point to isolate myself all but one day a month. After all, I was human. I needed some human contact.

During that one day, I did my shopping. I had my hair styled. I went to the bookstore. Once, I went to a music festival. Another time, I spent the day helping an old lady weed her flowerbeds. It wasn’t much, as human contact went, but it helped me maintain my humanity.

The rest of my time was spent reading and scouring the internet and the files for any sign of CK’s brother. Colby was a ghost, as were the mother and daughter of Eugene’s partner. Every morning, I hiked. Every night, I did my taekwondo forms. As one form was firmly engrained in my psyche, I’d go onto the internet to learn a new one. I also took up cross-stitch and crochet.

And for months now, my routine was enough to keep me going despite missing my friends. I prayed they were doing well. It took all my willpower not to check on them. I didn’t even open my old email account or check social media.

Call me clueless, but avoidism was my way of coping. It was good enough. Until now.

Now, even with all this open space around me, I was suffocating. It was like I was in a balloon deflating around me. I always knew the balloon was there. At first, it was fine. Living in a balloon was fine—fun even. I could safely be in the world without being of the world. There was a difference, a layer of insulation that I needed.

But the more I bounced around in my balloon, the smaller it became as if deflating from a slow leak. As much time as I spent staying in shape, I didn’t think I could prevent the balloon from crushing me when all the oxygen was gone.

Maybe I needed to up my visits to town to twice a month or to join an online grief support group. Or, as some tiny voice inside me suggested, I needed to reconnect with my real life, the one I walked away from. Would my friends want me back? Would Alec?

Maybe I could reach out to Father DiMarco. He would at least be kind whether he still cared about me or not. I wasn’t so sure Stiff or Alec would be as forgiving. I had hurt both of them massively.

If I could find Colby, I could use the information as an excuse to reach out. I’d need an excuse. I didn’t have the courage to walk back into their lives without anything to offer.

I took another sip of the hot chocolate. My final sip. It was time to face the computer again. Maybe I would see something this time that I hadn’t seen before. Today, as selfish as it sounded, was as much for me as it was for CK and Colby.

I inserted earbuds and cranked the music. Quiet and solitude were a general way of life, but I still worked best with music pounding in my head. It forced me to focus through the music on the project before me.

The files CK had provided were etched in my brain. I really didn’t need the computer to go over them again. I could do it in my sleep, my recall was so good. Instead, I spent time checking the data mining results from the last twenty-four hours. The mining parameters were narrowly set to images of Colby in the past and aged progressions of Colby over time.

Only three results today. Good. It would be easy to disprove the two social media photos and the one news article. Not all days were so easy. Some of the photo matches were horrific depictions from perverted sites that were not fit for human consumption. Those were the nights I didn’t sleep much.

I was working on tracing the kid in the news article when a hand on my shoulder was my first clue I wasn’t alone.

Whipping around, I was ready to fight my way to freedom. The fight went out of me when I saw Alec stepping back with his hands up. I pulled the buds out of my ears and dropped them on the desk.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I’ve come to take you home."

"How did you find me?"

Alec grinned. "Teela, you are not the only one with skills. The cabin is in your name. So is the SUV. Your picture is in the local newspaper."

"It is?"

"You didn’t know? You were lauded as the mysterious good Samaritan who helped the town’s oldest resident tend her flower garden."

"Oh." I wasn’t sure what else to say. What was done was done.

To be honest, I was bit disappointed it had taken Alec so long to find me. I hadn’t taken any real steps to disappear otherwise I would have set up a new identity and purchased my assets in that name. The longer I went undisturbed, the easier it was to convince myself everyone was relieved I was gone.

Alec put his hands down and approached me slowly. When he was close enough to touch, he squatted so he was at eye level.

"Tee, can you come home now? I miss you."

"But I left you."

"No, you didn’t. You took a time out to deal with your grief. I would have preferred to be a part of your process, especially considering my profession, but I did understand. We all did."

"Including Stiff?"

"Maybe not Stiff."

I nodded. "I’m not going back."

"Alright. Then I’m staying here, at least part time. I have a business to run, after all."

"I don’t know." My head and heart were beginning to hurt.

"Let me stay the night. Decide in the morning."

I wanted Alec to stay. I really did, but I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I gave up the right to a happily ever after the day Bea died.