Chapter 10: The Journal

Alexander's Pov

I found it by accident, three weeks into David's investigation, while searching the penthouse library for old financial documents my grandmother had once mentioned.

A leather notebook, tucked behind a row of books that hadn't been touched in years. Lily's handwriting covered every page.

I shouldn't have opened it. I opened it anyway.

Sketches filled the first pages. My face, drawn in careful pencil lines, again and again, from angles I didn't know anyone had studied that closely. Beneath one drawing, small handwriting read: "He smiled today. Real, not for show. I wonder if he knows how rare that is."

Pressed flowers fell from between the pages, roses from the garden she used to tend alone on the balcony while I ignored her existence.

I kept reading, unable to stop myself.

"He doesn't see me, and some days I think that's kinder than if he did. If he saw me, he'd see how much I already love him, and that would only give him one more thing to be cruel about."

Another page, dated the week after our wedding: "I promised myself I wouldn't fall for him. I broke that promise on our wedding day, watching him lie so easily to his dying grandmother, wishing just once he'd look at me the way he looked at her."

Further in, an entry made me stop breathing entirely: "I think I might be sick most mornings now. I haven't told anyone. I'm too afraid of what it means, and too afraid of what he'll say if I'm right."

My hands were shaking by the time I reached the final entries, written in the days before she disappeared.

"I heard them tonight. Convenient. Pathetic. A nobody. I suppose I always knew that's what I was to him. I just didn't expect it to hurt this much to hear it out loud."

I sat on the library floor for a long time, surrounded by pressed flowers and pencil sketches of a man who didn't deserve a single page of that notebook, and I understood, with devastating clarity, exactly what I had thrown away.

She had loved me. Genuinely, quietly, without asking for anything in return. And I had treated that love like garbage, worth less than the contract that bound us together.

I thought of that entry about mornings and sickness, and a terrible possibility began forming in my mind, one I wasn't ready to say out loud even to myself.

I called Rachel that same night. She answered on the fourth ring, her voice guarded the moment she heard mine.

"Don't call this number again."

"Rachel, please. I need to find her."

"You had two years to find her, Alexander. Two years to see what was right in front of you. Why would I help you now?"

"Because I was wrong. Because I finally understand what I did to her, and I can't undo it if I don't even know where she is." I gripped the journal tighter. "Rachel, is she sick? Is something wrong with her?"

A long silence answered that question louder than words could have.

"You want my help? Prove you've actually changed first," Rachel finally said. "Real change, not a rich man's guilt lasting a week before he goes back to being exactly who he was. Lily deserves better than another lie."

The line went dead before I could respond.

I called David next, my voice steadier than I felt. "I need everything you can find on Lily's location. Discreetly. And David, this isn't about the divorce or the company. This is personal."

"You're serious about this."

"More serious than I've been about anything in years."

David was quiet for a moment. "Alexander, if you find her and you haven't actually changed, you'll destroy whatever's left of her. You understand that, right?"

"I understand." I looked down at the journal again, at a sketch of my own hands drawn with more tenderness than I'd ever shown the real ones. "That's exactly why I can't rush this. I need to become someone worth finding first."

"Then start now. Tomorrow, come into the office sober and clear-headed, and we'll rebuild this company the right way. No more hiding evidence. No more protecting people who don't deserve it."

"Agreed."

After we hung up, I looked down at the journal in my hands, at sketches of a smile I barely remembered giving, and made a decision that would define the rest of my life.

I was going to become the man Lily believed I could be, whether it took months or years. And then I was going to find her, and spend whatever time I had left proving her love hadn't been wasted on someone unworthy of it.

For the first time since she'd walked out of my life, I let myself feel every bit of the loss. It nearly broke me.

Good. I deserved to feel it.

I sat there until the sun rose over the city, the journal held against my chest like something sacred, and made myself a promise I intended to keep no matter what it cost me.

I would find her. I would become someone worth finding. And if she ever let me close enough to explain, I would spend the rest of my life proving that the man in those sketches, the one who smiled and meant it, was the man I could still become, if she was willing to give me the chance I never deserved.

The city outside kept moving, indifferent to the quiet war being fought inside one broken man's heart, and for the first time in years, I let myself hope that some things, even things as shattered as this, might still be worth fighting to fix.