Chapter 19. Lines in Water

The storm had passed. Not outside—the skies were impossibly blue, the air still and warm as though nothing had gone awry. Sunlight poured through the tall windows, pooling on the polished marble floors in golden rivers that glittered like a promise. Yet inside the villa, silence clung to the walls like smoke after a blaze: dense, omnipresent, lingering in every corridor and room.

Alyssa searched for Max all morning and well into the afternoon. His sleek black sedan was gone from the drive, his office door locked tight. Evelyn, ever discreet, didn’t ask questions, and Alyssa offered no explanations. The rooms he’d touched—the hallway just beyond the gallery where he paused to admire a bronze sculpture, the low lounge where their lips almost met, the chair beside her bed where he once read by lamplight—retained only his echo. No warmth. No footprints in the dust. He’d vanished.

Good, she told herself. She needed distance. She needed time. She needed the safety of solitude