Chapter 3

The entire car ride back was suffocatingly tense.

I leaned my head against the passenger window, pretending to catch some rest, but I kept a sharp eye on Silas' every move.

He drove smoothly, his expression completely unreadable, but I had this gut feeling that he kept stealing glances at me in the rearview mirror.

When we pulled up outside my house, I pushed the car door open, muttered a quick thanks, and hurried toward the front door.

"Jace," Silas called out, stopping me in my tracks, "Let the past stay in the past. If Scarlett is watching over you from heaven, the thing she'd want most is for you to move on and live a normal life."

My footsteps paused. I turned back to look at him, but his face gave nothing away.

"I know. Thanks, man."

With that, I turned, unlocked the front door, slipped inside, and slammed it shut, pressing my back flat against the wood as I gasped for air.

Without wasting a second, I headed straight for the study and carefully dragged out a dusty cardboard box holding Scarlett's old keepsakes.

Deep down in the bottom compartment, wrapped tightly in brown parcel paper, was a shattered, broken phone.

It was the phone Scarlett had on her the day she fell. Even though it was completely wrecked, I had kept it safe all these years, never once daring to touch it.

Right now, it was my only lifeline to uncover the secret buried deep underground.

I took the phone to a trusted tech friend of mine and begged him to help me salvage whatever data was left on it.

The second he started running diagnostics, my friend frowned.

"Dude, where the hell did you even dig up a phone like this? Even the contact list was protected by a triple-layered security lock.

"With this level of security clearance, who was the owner? Some kind of secret agent?"

He said it as a joke, but my heart skipped a beat.

Scarlett and I had dated for a year and been married for two. I thought I knew everything about her.

Why would an ordinary office worker like her need a phone with triple-layered security?

My friend told me the data recovery would take at least three days. After thanking him, I headed straight down to the corporate building where Scarlett used to work.

She had always told me she worked as an administrative clerk at an import-export firm. I had driven over to pick her up outside a few times, but I'd never actually gone inside.

When I walked up to the front desk and gave the company name, the property manager furrowed his brow.

"Are you sure you have the right name?

"There's never been an import-export company registered in our directory."

…

I froze. I double-checked the address and the company name on my phone, but he shook his head with absolute certainty.

To prove he wasn't making it up, he even turned his monitor toward me and pulled up the company’s entire registration history.

Not only was it missing from this building, but across the entire city, Scarlett's so-called company had never even existed.

Walking out of the glass building, a freezing numbness spread through my limbs.

Why had Scarlett lied to me?

If she wasn't working at that company at all, then where on earth was she going every single morning and coming back late at night?

After three days of walking around like a zombie, my friend finally called me to pick up the phone.

"Your phone is practically cursed, man. The exact moment I successfully recovered the contact list, the system triggered a security tripwire and fried the memory board completely!

"Good thing I snapped a picture of the screen with my ninja reflexes just in time, or we would've lost it all."

In the photo my friend showed me, Scarlett's contact list only had three names on it.

Me, Silas, and a mysterious contact saved simply as "Mr. Hunter."

A wave of panic hit me like a physical blow as I stared at that phone number.

I was one hundred percent certain that from the time we started dating until the day she died, I had never heard of anyone named Hunter in her life.

Yet according to the call logs, not only did she talk to this Hunter person almost every single day, but some of those calls happened at two or three in the morning—long after I was already fast asleep.

A hidden contact list, daily check-ins, and secret late-night phone calls.

Piled on top of each other, these clues pointed toward one devastating conclusion: Scarlett had been cheating on me.