Chapter Nine: Gone

Lily's Pov

The coastal town Rachel found for me smelled like salt and starting over.

She'd rented a small apartment above a bakery under her cousin's name, far enough from New York that no Hunt lawyer would think to look. I got a job waiting tables at a diner by the pier, then a second job cleaning offices at night when the first paycheck barely covered rent.

My stomach had started to round by the time I found a doctor willing to see me without insurance questions I couldn't answer.

"You're healthy," Dr. Ling told me at my first appointment. "But you're underweight and exhausted. You need to slow down."

"I can't slow down."

She studied me with concerned eyes but didn't push. I was grateful for that. I didn't have room in me to explain the whole truth.

Rachel called every few days, always checking, always worried. "You need to rest more, Lily. That baby needs you healthy."

"I'm fine, Rachel. We're managing."

"You keep saying that word. Managing. Not living. Managing."

She wasn't wrong, but I didn't know how to be anything else anymore. Surviving had become the only language I knew how to speak.

Some nights, after both shifts ended, I sat by the water and let myself remember. Alexander's hands in the dark. His grandmother's gentle voice. The two seconds when I thought, foolishly, he might have chosen me if things had been different.

I never let myself remember for long. Remembering hurt too much, and I had a baby to protect now.

Sophie's calls became the brightest part of my week, even as guilt gnawed at me for the lies I kept telling her about my new job in a new city.

"You sound tired lately," she said one evening.

"New job. New city. Lots to get used to."

"I miss you so much. When can I visit?"

"Soon, sweetheart. I promise." Another lie, added to the pile I was building to keep her safe from a truth too dangerous to share yet.

The bakery owner downstairs, a widow named Marisol, started leaving bread on my doorstep some mornings without being asked, the same way Elena used to fuss over me back in New York.

"You eat for two now," Marisol told me once, patting my growing belly with a warm, weathered hand. "Rest more, worry less. The rest works itself out."

I wanted to believe her, but worry had become as constant as my own heartbeat. Every unfamiliar car that slowed near the diner made my pulse spike, certain Vincent Shaw or a Hunt family lawyer had finally tracked me down.

Some nights, I dreamed of Alexander's hands, warm and gentle in the dark, before I remembered whose name he'd actually whispered, and whose name would always come first in his heart.

I woke from those dreams with tears already falling, grateful no one was there to see them, and grateful, too, in some small aching way, that at least I had this baby to fight for now.

**********

Alexander's Pov

I came home from the funeral reception to an empty penthouse and signed divorce papers sitting on my desk like a final verdict.

I told myself I felt nothing. I told myself this was exactly what I wanted, the contract fulfilled, the arrangement over, one less complication in my life.

I did not expect the silence to feel this loud.

Elena found me three days later, still in the same clothes, a bottle of scotch nearly empty beside me.

"Mr. Hunt, this isn't like you."

"She's gone, Elena. That was always the plan."

"Was it the plan for you to sit here like this?" Elena's voice held none of its usual softness. "That girl loved you. Anyone with eyes could see it. And you let her walk out of here with nothing."

"She has three million dollars coming to her."

"Money isn't what she wanted, and you know it." Elena shook her head sadly and left me alone with my scotch and my growing unease.

David called an hour later, his voice tight with urgency. "We have a serious problem. I pulled the full audit on Cassandra's accounts. It's not thousands, Alexander. It's tens of millions, moved offshore over five years."

"How is that possible? I had eyes on her."

"Apparently not enough of them." David paused. "There's something else. Some of these transfers happened right before your grandmother's medications were changed. I don't like the pattern I'm seeing."

Cold dread settled in my stomach, a feeling I wasn't used to and didn't know what to do with.

"Keep digging," I told him. "Quietly. And David, thank you. For seeing what I refused to."

After he hung up, I poured another drink and stared out at the city that had never once made me feel as unsettled as an empty room down the hall from mine.

I told myself the unease was about the money. About Cassandra's betrayal. About my grandmother.

I refused to admit, even to myself, exactly whose absence I was actually feeling, or how much emptier this penthouse had become without her quiet presence somewhere in it.

My father called the next morning, his voice as cold and clipped as always. "I hear your little arrangement finally ended. Good. That girl was an embarrassment to the family name."

"Don't talk about her."

The sharpness in my own voice surprised me. James paused on the other end of the line, clearly caught off guard.

"Careful, son. You're starting to sound like you actually cared about that plain little nobody."

I hung up without answering, my hand tight around the phone, something dark and unfamiliar twisting in my chest at his words. Nobody. The same word Cassandra used. The same careless cruelty I'd used myself, more times than I wanted to count.

I poured the scotch down the sink instead of into a glass and told myself it was the first step toward getting my head straight for the shareholder meeting.

It wasn't, not really. Some quieter part of me already knew exactly whose absence had put that scotch bottle in my hand in the first place.