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Those mothafuckas were completely useless.

The detectives approached his disappearance with more suspicion than urgency. To them, Caspian wasn’t a man with a family and a woman waiting for him at home; he was just a grown man with dark money, dangerous associates, and a reputation that made the detectives more interested in who might’ve wanted him gone than in pretending his disappearance shocked them.

They threw out every dismissive theory they had.

Maybe he ran.

Maybe he owed money to the wrong people.

Maybe he was laying low.

And then one detective leaned back in his chair and asked if maybe Caspian had another woman hidden across town.

I came inches away from getting arrested right there in the precinct for lunging across that desk.

Still, nothing they said sounded like the Caspian I knew.

No matter how cold or ruthless he could be out in those streets, Caspian would’ve never abandoned me without saying something.

Hell, nothing about the conversations we’d had that morning suggested he was planning to leave me.

I could feel in my bones that something was wrong, that Caspian hadn’t simply decided to disappear and leave me behind. But feeling like something terrible had happened and actually knowing what happened were two completely different things.

I didn’t know where he was, whether he was hurt, whether he was hiding, whether he was alive somewhere and unable to come back, or whether I would ever see him again. That uncertainty was what slowly wore me down because every possibility left just enough room for hope and just enough room for fear to keep me from ever finding peace.

For weeks, it was hard for me to get a good night’s rest. Every heavy knock at the front door sent my heart leaping into my throat, convinced someone had finally come to tell me they found his remains. Every black truck that drove down the street made me double-take, and every unknown number that flashed across my screen made my hands shake so violently I could barely swipe to answer.

Granny and my sister took turns sleeping on either side of me because some nights I would wake up gasping for air, sobbing into my pillows before I was even fully conscious.

I stayed in that town for as long as I did because some stupid, desperate part of me believed that the day I packed my bags would be the exact day Caspian finally walked back through the door.

What if he comes home tomorrow? I would tell myself every night.

Then tomorrow would come, and the doorway stayed empty.

Eventually, the weight of the city became suffocating.

I couldn’t drive down a single street without imagining Caspian in the passenger seat beside me. I couldn’t pass the restaurants where we used to sit, and I couldn’t even look at the turn that led up the hill toward his mansion without feeling like somebody had plunged a blade into my chest. Everyone in town had a rumor, but nobody had an answer.

I was hollowed out by depression, and once I realized that staying in Hallowridge was going to cost me what was left of myself, I made the decision to leave.

Not across the country.

I couldn’t bring myself to go that far.

I chose Ravenport, Delmore, which was a little over four and a half hours from Hallowridge. It was close enough that I could get back home in a day without exhausting myself on the road, but far enough that I wouldn’t have to pass places connected to Caspian every time I went to work or bought groceries.

Leaving Hallowridge would’ve been hard enough if it were only me… but it wasn’t.

Four months earlier, I had given birth to a handsome little boy named Kaidence.

When I found out I was carrying Caspian’s child, my entire world fractured.

One day I threw up while brushing my teeth before a morning shift. I blamed it on stress, on the fact that I had barely eaten a full meal in twenty days, on the exhaustion that felt like lead in my bones. But the second morning it happened, my sister stood in the bathroom doorway with her arms crossed, watching the color drain from my face.

“When was your last period, Lakelyn?”

I told her to shut up.