Ben had said May. Eight months. But Lucia said a year.
Last Christmas, then. The diamond earrings. The New Year's toast. Our anniversary dinner in March where he'd held my hand across the table and told me he'd marry me all over again.
All of it—lies. Or worse: true in the moment and still not enough.
The timeline in my head reordered itself, tainting memories I hadn't even thought to question yet.
"Did he love you?"
The question came out before I could stop it. It was the only question that actually mattered.
I heard her breathing on the other end. The sound was jagged and wet.
"I thought..." Her voice broke. "I don't know. I thought so. He said—he said—" She couldn't finish. "But now he's?—"
In the background, I heard a sound that chilled me. A raw, guttural sob. Lucia was crying, mourning him. She was grieving my husband with a force that rivaled my own.
Then, a click.
The line went dead.
I stood there in my kitchen, holding the phone, staring at the blank screen.
Lucia Vance was real and she was grieving. And she had hung up before I could ask where to find her.
Ben's words came back to me, quiet and certain: a second phone. Ryan would have had a second phone. Except I'd torn this house apart. Every drawer, every pocket, every place a man might hide something. And I'd found nothing because there was nothing to find.
It had never been here.
I went to my bag and found the folder from the police station. The vehicle recovery report. I hadn't opened it that day in the parking lot because I hadn't wanted to think about the car, the road, any of it. I opened it now.
Near the bottom, under Items Recovered from Vehicle:Device, mobile, unrecoverable.
I stared at those words. It had been crushed beyond anything useful, or waterlogged from the cold and the mud, or both. Ryan'’s second phone was gone… as was every call, every photo, every piece of evidence of the life he'd been living while I made dinner and filed paperwork and trusted him. Gone. Destroyed by the same patch of ice that took him.
There was nothing left to find.
But I had a name. I knew what she did for a living. And I had Google.
I walked to the island, opened Ryan's laptop, and typedLucia Vance Real Estateinto the search bar.
Chapter 11
Olivia
Ityped her name into the search bar. My fingers felt stiff, clumsy on the keys, like I was typing in a foreign language.
Lucia Vance Real Estate.
I hit enter.
The results loaded with a speed that felt cruel. Her company website was the first hit—a sleek, monochromatic design with a banner photo of a house balanced over the hillside. All glass and steel and warm, expensive light.
I clickedAbout.
The page refreshed, and there she was.
Lucia Vance.
