The real Lila. I was already ten minutes late for my Contracts class when I felt someone watching me. To be honest I had felt like someone was watching and following me all morning. It wasn’t unusual. Harvard Law was a fishbowl of intense, observant people. But this felt different more intrusive, more intentional. The stare burned into the side of my face as I crossed the yard, books clutched tight against my chest like a shield. I told myself not to look. I was late. Professor Kingsley was not forgiving.Still, curiosity got the better part of me. He was tall, standing just outside Austin Hall, and he wasn’t dressed like a student. Too rumpled. Too out of place. Brown leather jacket worn at the elbows. Hair that looked like he’d run his hands through it one too many times. And eyes god, his eyes that fixed on me with a kind of urgency that made my stomach twist.“Lila Harlow?” he asked before I could pass.I stopped mid step. He knew my name.“Yes?” My voice was cautious, laced wi
Luca. If there was one thing I hated, was being lied to and the fact that Lila had done it so well was eating me up. I immediately left the hospital reception and went straight to my car. I knew who I had to see next. I didn’t stop to think.I dialed my father's number, but he did not pick up. I drove anyway. Rain lashed at the windshield, the kind of rain that makes the world blur. Fitting, I thought. Everything in my life was blurred now. Twisted. Betrayed.She lied. Lila lied. Or rather… she was the lie. Was her name even Lila to begin with? By the time I reached my father’s house, my hands were shaking. My heart thudded so hard I felt it in my throat. I didn’t knock. I pushed the door open like a man possessed.“Dad!” I called out. “Dad, I need to talk to you. Now.”He came around the corner in his reading glasses and cardigan, blinking like I’d dragged him out of a dream. “Luca? What.. what’s going on? Are you okay?”“No,” I rasped. “She’s not who she says she is.”He stared.
Luca. Lila had always seemed like the most naive woman who had ever crossed my path and sometimes I pitied her because she did not know how cruel this world could get. But now I was just realizing I was the naïve one all along. She was just playing a part and she played it so well because she had me fooled. I didn't even see it or suspect because she had gotten into my head so good, I wasn't even thinking straight. I didn’t even realize I’d hung up the phone until Vanessa asked me what happened.“He’s dead,” I said hollowly. “Dr. Rourke is dead, they said he died three weeks ago.”She sat up straight. “Jesus. That’s…”“Too damn convenient,” I finished for her.She didn’t argue. Instead, she watched as I paced to her kitchen table and dropped into the chair like my legs were going to give out. My brain was racing. Rourke had been the only one who treated Lila that night. He looked like he knew something, like he was scared of her or for her. And now, he was gone. Just like her. May
Luca I woke up disoriented, the ceiling above me unfamiliar, the dull ache in my neck making itself known the moment I shifted. For a second, I didn’t remember where I was or how I got there, but then Vanessa’s voice echoed from last night, the worry in her eyes as she offered me her sofa, the bottle of whiskey still three quarters full on her kitchen counter.Vanessa’s apartment was too neat for someone like me to intrude in, but she hadn’t let me leave. Said I looked like hell. She wasn’t wrong.I sat up slowly, my jacket draped over the armrest, my phone heavy in my palm like a stone I’d carried through a storm. I stared at it for a second, thumb hovering over the screen.Lila.Her name was enough to make my chest constrict.Everything from last night came rushing back: the flash of her eyes, the way her voice cracked when she said she had to leave, how she vanished into the night as if she'd never existed. And now, after a night of nothing no answers, no clues I had a thread. A
Vanessa. I had seen him get emotional before, but not like this. He seemed broken, finally someone had broken him the way he was used to breaking women. I look at him again wondering if maybe this was a show, but it was real. He broke in front of me like a baby. Not in some cinematic way where the sky darkens and a thunderclap punctuates the moment. No. Luca’s breaking is quieter, more raw. His shoulders slump, like the weight of the world has finally settled on his back and he’s done pretending it’s light. His hands cover his face, but I can still see the tremble in his fingertips, the slight hitch in his breath.And it hits me harder than I expect how much I hate seeing him like this.I thought this would make me happy, Atleast make my ego happy, considering how he broke up with me, but it wasn't at all. For a long, stunned second, I just stand there. Watching. Absorbing every piece of him as if I could memorize the contours of this exact moment and hold onto it. His pain shoul
Luca. It felt like I had been drinking all night, I had actually started earlier, back in the house before I went to the club. I wanted to just forget everything but it was not working, she was all I could think about trying to go through all scenarios in my head on what could have really happened. Did Lila ran away or was she kidnapped was the question. I don’t remember getting into Vanessa’s car. I ran into her at the club and we shared some drinks together, she was keeping it cordial despite everything that had went down between us and I appreciated that. The last thing I needed tonight was arguing with her. I didn't have it in me. One second I was standing on the curb outside the club, trying to remember how to spell my own name, and the next I was in her living room. Warm, dim, it still smells like orange blossom and something sweet, just like it always has. Maybe candles. Or maybe she smells like that. I don’t know. I’m spinning.Vanessa kicks off her heels near the couch a
LilaI woke up to darkness. Not the kind that lingers just before dawn or the kind you feel behind closed eyes but a suffocating, heavy kind that pressed against my face like a weight. My heart thudded against my ribs as I tried to move and realized I couldn’t. My arms were twisted painfully behind me, wrists tied tight with something rough. Rope? Fabric? I couldn’t tell. Panic swelled in my chest like a scream rising up my throat.Where the hell was I? I tried to recollect my thoughts,I tried to breathe evenly, to calm the trembling in my limbs, but everything felt wrong. The surface beneath me was cold and hard. Maybe concrete. The air smelled stale like dust, sweat, and faint traces of perfume. A blindfold covered my eyes, tight enough that the edges dug into my temples. I tried to shift, to feel something familiar, but there was nothing. Just the low hum of my own fear.My mouth opened, a scream forming on my lips but nothing came out. Then I heard the door open somewhere behind
LucaI stared down a the note again after hanging up, reading the words letter by letter wondering if there was an hidden message in it. None of this made any logical sense at all. She had just left, wnd with my baby too. That was it. No explanation, no goodbye, no signature. Just that one cold sentence scrawled in Lila’s tight, deliberate handwriting. I must’ve read it a hundred times already, but the weight of it hadn’t eased up one bit.My thumb slid over my phone screen. The image I’d taken of the note glared back at me proof this wasn’t some twisted dream. Lila was gone. Nothing in her room was touched at all, but her phone had been found dumped in a wrecked car at a junkyard off I-90, and the trail ended there.I tried to think like her, tried to imagine what could have driven her to vanish. She wasn’t impulsive. If anything, Lila was methodical disciplined to the point of obsession. She wouldn’t just disappear unless she had a damn good reason… or unless someone made her.Eit
LucaI had tried calling her several times, her phone went straight to voice mail. I knew she was mad at me but this was absolutely pissing me off. She knew I hated it when she never picked her phone, especially now that she was pregnant. I called Maria who answered on the second ring. "Hey, put Lila on the phone Maria." I said as soon as she picked up. "She is not yet home sir.""What do you mean she is not home yet, she left the office a couple of hours ago." something was definitely not right. I checked the watch it had been atleast four hours since she left the office, she should be home by now. "She said she was stopping by the market to pick up some groceries to cook for you sir." Maria said, getting me out of my head, "She said she wanted to make you something special." Maria added. "She should be home by now, I am on my way." I said hanging up. I immediately sent my security her number and told him to track her and find out where she was as I rushed to the car. I had t