Ralph stared at the phone like it had insulted him. Honestly, it had.Twice in one day. Twice. First Rebecca, now his uncle. He had never once regretted the existence of 21st century technology more than he did at this exact moment.Clearly, it was time to get a new burner phone.He let it ring, briefly entertaining the idea of throwing it across the room and pretending he had suddenly become deaf. Maybe he could claim he had gone off the grid. But then the ringing stopped only to immediately start again.Ralph exhaled sharply and answered.“Ralph,” came his uncle’s voice, a deep, measured tone that somehow always carried a quiet weight of authority, even when he wasn’t trying.Ralph pinched the bridge of his nose. “Uncle Burke?”There was a pause. A pause Ralph recognized well. The kind of pause that meant his uncle was about to say something he wouldn’t like.“How is Silvia?”Ralph’s eye twitched.His grip on the phone tightened as he processed those three cursed words. Of all the th
Ralph leaned against the door frame, crossing his arms as he held up the DNA test kit. She turned to him, brows raised in curiosity. His voice was clipped all business. “I need a sample of your DNA.”The pan slipped from her fingers, clattering into the sink.Ralph froze.She stared at the DNA test like it was a live grenade.She hesitantly stepped forward, remaining silent as she stared at the kit in his hands. Her expression was unreadable, showing no surprise but clear confusion.Of course, she wouldn’t be. She never seemed surprised by anything. Like some quiet little idiot who had already resigned herself to whatever nonsense the world threw her way.He hated that.Ralph took a measured breath, shoving that irritation down. “Swab your cheek,” he ordered, holding out one of the sterile cotton swabs.She obeyed without a word, taking the swab and running it along the inside of her cheek before handing it back. She was as meek as ever, her movements small and precise like she was
Ralph's MansionRebecca waltzed into the mansion like she hadn’t just spent the last week banned from it. Her heels clicked against the marble floor, an arrogant rhythm that matched the smirk on her lips. Ralph had been an evil bastard all week, keeping her away like some misbehaving child, but none of that mattered now. She was here, and she would take care of the wench who had dared to sink her claws into her man and dared to give him thoughts that he could ever ban her from his own home for a bloody week!The air inside the mansion was thick with the scent of expensive cologne and aged wood, but something felt off. Typically, when she walked through those doors, Donna, the ever-dutiful housekeeper, would rush to greet her because, of course, Rebecca wasn’t just any guest. She was Ralph’s future wife, and by extension, the true authority in this house.But there was no Donna. No housekeepers, no stupid Silvia, no security standing at attention. The silence pressed against her ear
Silvia stood by and watched everything that was unfolding before her. It was so unusual for Ralph to treat Rebecca this way. His voice was sharp and merciless. This was a storm locked inside a human being.What had gotten over him?She just didn't understand. Ralph's eyes met hers, as cold as steel, and she found herself stepping back instinctively. Her breath caught. She wasn’t strong enough to hold that stare. No one was.Rebecca noticed. And like a viper, she turned.She looked as though she was about to rip her head off her neck.Silvia could literally feel the steam emanating from Rebecca's nostrils and just didn't want to have to deal with it. "You," she spat, venom dripping from the single word. It was a threat wrapped in rage.The tension was so thick, a knife could cut through it. It was suffocating."Get back to work, Silvia," Ralph demanded while Rebecca couldn't help but stare at him in disbelief."You can't be serious," she said, her eyes wide as saucers, her body tremb
Ralph paced back and forth, staring at the message on his phone. Uncle Burke. He'd been noticing his uncle's change of indifference towards Silvia lately and didn't know whether to be concerned about that or not.I think we need to have a dinner meeting once again. He typed. It would be a pleasure to meet your wife once again.Ralph's brows furrowed. And he wasn't in the mood to beat around the bush, so he went straight to the point.What do you want with my wife? The demand hung in the air, heavy with tension and a sense of impatience. Silence stretched on, each passing moment amplifying the unease as the words lingered on the screen, already read yet unanswered. Just as he was about to lose his cool, a notification chimed, signaling the arrival of a response.'Your wife is lovely, Ralph. It would be unkind of me not to pay my visit at least once in a while.'He didn't buy it.'You weren't saying this before. And you know me better than this game you're trying to play, Burke. I kn
Silvia adjusted the strap of her handbag nervously as she glanced at him.She hesitated for a moment before pushing back all her anxiety then asked the question that had been clawing at her chest. “Wh....where exactly are you taking me?” she stammered. Ralph glanced over at her, brow arched like she’d just asked something ridiculous. But something about her cautious tone made him answer.“To the hospital.""The hospital?" she repeated with a gasp. She was confused and her heart sank. All the blood drained from her face. What had happened to her mother again?Seeing her distraught, he took a moment before explaining the situation to her."Your mother’s still recovering, isn’t she? Yes, she was at home when you left her but had to be readmitted a few weeks later. She had a slightly unrelated episode. The hospital decided to keep her longer so she would make a full recovery. A heart surgery and stress are not best of friends.”Ralph had asked one of his men to keep an eye on Theresa an
Silvia appreciated the silence as she mechanically cleaned the home. This time, she truly wanted to make it a warm home instead of just doing it out of obligation. Her soft cleaning fabric sliding across the French window's glass produced a rhythmical sound that permeated the room, along with the light aroma of lavender from the cleansers. Lost in her thoughts, she was shaken back to reality by a voice behind her as she meticulously buffed the surface. Startled, she turned, her heart pounding, realizing Ralph had been quietly watching her with an intensity that made her spine tingle.His arms were folded, but his stance was far from relaxed. Something was boiling beneath his usual composed exterior—like a man struggling with something he didn’t want to name."What are you thinking about?" he questioned. So many things swirled in her head—thoughts of her mum, the monotony of her daily life, the exertion of her job, and yes, Ralph—his presence was both comforting and confusing. A na
The dawn filtered softly through the curtains, printing shiny patterns across the bedchamber floor. It filled the room with a warm, dreamlike light, gliding over the ornate furniture, the golden moldings, and the pair entwined in the vast bed.Silvia stirred, blinking against the unfamiliar richness around her. This wasn’t her cramped little room tucked away in the servants' wing at the back of the mansion. A place she'd occupied from the beginning. The sheets beneath her were unrealistically comfortable, bedding opulent in a way her bed never was. Silk sheets clung like a whisper, pillows like clouds. Comfort this profound felt almost illicit.Then she realized someone was behind her. The weight of his arm around her waist and the rhythm of his breath against her nape worked to remind her of everything they did last night. Last night hadn’t been a dream.Her breath caught as heat rushed to her cheeks. She dared not move, as if any motion might shatter the fragile reality. Behind her
Silvia froze in Laurent's hold, her eyes wide open in obvious fright. She clenched and unclenched her fists, sweat beading on her forehead in tiny dots. Then, just as suddenly as it had died, the light flared back on with a harsh, yellowish-white glare, illuminating the nightmare once more.Laurent’s grip remained iron-tight. The gun was still there, pressed against Silvia’s temple like a threat carved from steel.The tears she had been holding back broke loose when she saw the defeated look on Ralph's face."Time is ticking, boy or maybe you need more incentive, huh?" Laurent Laurent growled, the gun shifting slightly as he toyed with the trigger.Ralph subconsciously took a step forward, a hand stretched out—not in surrender, but in silent desperation. "Not another step closer, Ralphie unless you want to see what the inside of her head looks like."Silvia whimpered again, her teary eyes seeking reassurance from Ralph. Their eyes met and his lips pressed together into a thin line.
Ralph pinched the bridge of his nose, careful not to make any sudden movements that would give his father any crazy ideas. His father...who knew that they would have such an unexpected reunion and in such an aggressive manner?His father, waving a gun at him and his daughter-in-law as if they were not his family because he wanted the rights of a company he abandoned? Nothing made any sense but all he knew was that he could not put Silvia's life in danger for something she knew nothing about."Let her go," Ralph croaked, scratching his suddenly itchy beard. The room was stuffy and hot because the windows were locked. But for the flashlights on, the room would have been pitch black."What?" Both his father and Silvia asked simultaneously, whipping their heads around to look at him with a mix of confusion and disbelief. Silvia gulped down the rest of her courage and shrank into her husband's side when her crazy father-in-law glared at her with so much piercing intensity."She has nothin
"Did you hear that?" Silvia's hold on Ralph's arm tightened as she stared down at the dark hallway in their country house. The lights had flickered a moment, leaving the old house with an eerie half-darkness lit only by the dim brightness of backup lights.Ralph's voice faded away, his senses immediately on high alert. The tranquility of their weekend escape had been abruptly disrupted. "Listen to what, sweetheart? Just the wind, I guess. The old house creaks with every breeze." He tried to sound soothing, but a trickle of nervousness had started at the back of his neck."No, it wasn't the wind," Silvia insisted, her voice little more than a whisper. "It sounded. nearer. A footfall on the landing."He listened attentively, the only noise the constant ticking of an old grandfather clock in the distance. "I don't hear anything now." He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. "Most likely just the house settling. It's an old house, keep in mind?""But I'm sure of it," Silvia insisted, her gaze f
Time became a salve, soothing the rough edges of their shared trauma. The trial was over, Rebecca's sentencing a brutal ending to that dismal episode. The mansion shed its final trappings of ominous presence, supplanted by a warmth that radiated from Ralph and Silvia's remade existence.Ralph's memory kept its gradual, inexorable return, here and there by way of the most unexpected sensory details – rain on dry ground evoked by a covert mid-day walk, a whiff of a particular spice evoking a recalled taste at an impromptu, laugh-soaked community meal. Each fragment regained was precious, laboriously interwoven into the tapestry of their past.Their bodies approached one another, unguarded now but filled with tender depth and revived passion. Whatever pretenses still existed were erased by reciprocal exposure, and an unmixed, unvarnished connection was all that was left. There was a raw chemical reaction to every touch, an unspoken vocabulary of yearning and remembrance. Every touch h
The initial days with Rebecca's detention were a blur of legal hearings, police interrogation, and the agonizing, painstaking process of attempting to reconstruct Ralph's fractured recall. The mansion, once the background against which Rebecca's lies were enacted, felt stifling in its quiet, its immensity filled with the unwilling reappearance of Ralph and Silvia's collective past.Overjoyed to have Silvia back, Ralph was plagued by the deafening silence of the empty areas in his mind. Months of unfulfilled days stretched like a chasm between the man he once had been and the one he still sought to reclaim. With each passing moment of bliss spent with Silvia, however, came nagging reminders of the man he had become when he was under Rebecca's control and his attempt to bridge the soul gap that had formed during her absence.The memories didn't return in a rush of recall, only disjointed flashbacks – a witticism spoken, his burning palm where her palm had rested, her perfume in his no
The air in the library was electric with a new tension, the heavy weight of Ralph's increasing awareness pressing down on Rebecca like a physical force as Ralph's fragmented memories struggled to see the light.Rebecca's eyes protruded in terror as the mask she had built so carefully disintegrated, and she could no longer hide.She trembled as she tried to reach out to Ralph, her voice ringing in a desperate cry. "Darling, you're not thinking. This woman...this woman means nothing to you. I am here, I have cared for you, loved you."Ralph withdrew from her reach and gazed steadily at the silver locket he held. The smile of Silvia, whose face shone out at him with joy, seemed to give off a glow that pierced through the icy smog of his loss of memory, as the light of a lighthouse calls a man home to a world out of which he had unwittingly strayed."Loving me?" Ralph repeated, his voice laced with increasing doubt. He looked at Rebecca, his eyes challenging, questioning. "Or controlling
The tarnished silver locket, clenched tight in Ralph's fist, was physical proof of memories Rebecca had callously tried to bury. The smiling faces on its diminutive borders were constant reminders of an erased past, a tug on the fragile strands of his amnesia.Rebecca's attempts to brush off the locket as belonging to "old friends" sounded insincere next to Ralph's mounting sense of recognition brewing in his mind. The falsehood clung to her voice like oil on water.He was taken with the little photo, studying her face, her laugh humming at the back of his mind. The tiny photograph smiled up at him—two faces, one unmistakably his, the other a woman who stirred echoes in the hollow spaces of his fractured memory.He would run his thumb over the line of her smile, feeling loss and regret engulfing him, a sense of yearning for something he couldn't quite identify."Who is she, Rebecca?" Ralph would ask again and again, his tone growing more insistent. "Why does she mean so much?"Her re
The doubts sown by Silvia and Burke were beginning to sprout in Ralph's mind, creeping like ghosts into the darkness of his thoughts.He was increasingly plagued by the lingering feeling, a feeling something was terribly amiss in this laboriously built world provided by Rebecca. He would find himself staring off into space, a furrow on his forehead, trying to grasp a wisp of an image, a whisper of a recollection. It was at such times of unrest that Rebecca would reappear out of nowhere, her voice low and calm, anchoring him in the present, pulling him back from the brink of his own turbulent mind; back to her."What's on your mind, sweetheart?" she would say, her arm on his. "Don't worry about unimportant things. Just focus on getting better. Focus on us."And Ralph would try. He would concentrate on Rebecca's smile, her words of support, her worry-free assurance. Still, though, that nagging feeling remained an itch that couldn't be scratched.One afternoon, when Rebecca was on a lo
The uncertainty lingered, a stark contrast to Rebecca's commanding presence. The pen clattered sharply beside the contract, a bold reminder that his company's fate and his very future hinged on that decisive moment. The air crackled with tension as she prepared to take control of the situation, knowing that every second counted in solidifying her position. Her grip on his arm suddenly tightened ever so subtly. "Darling," she said softly, her voice a soothing comfort, her eyes masking an unspoken urgency, "after thorough discussions, we have reached a point where we need to move forward with the Spire proposal. It's important to embark on this direction we’re taking. Trust me."Ralph's gaze shifted from the contract to her reassuring smile. The familiarity of her, the absolute certainty in her voice, were lifelines amidst amnesia's sea. He had to believe her, must believe her. The disturbing encounter with the crazy woman, that haunting melody disturbing interventions into the neat