Chapter 13
The coffeecup shattered against the tiles just as Lucas felt something crack inside him-like ice splintering through his
bones.
While he stood frozen in shock, Lillian remained eerily calm. “A friend from the airport came to visit me in prison,” she said. “He told me that on the day of Emily’s supposed plane crash, someone with her exact name-who looked exactly like her- bought three tickets. Not to Blue Ridge City, but to Arcadia State.”
Lucas couldn’t stay still another second. He bolted from the prison, sprinting to his car as he dialed his assistant. “Book me a flight to Arcadia State-now!”
The plane cut through the clouds, landing in a quiet Arcadian airport.
Lucas stopped at a boutique first, buying gifts like a man grasping at straws. As he stepped out, a gust of wind wrenched
his umbrella, its frame groaning in protest.
That was when he saw her.
Ten meters away, beneath a pine tree, a figure shook rainwater from her umbrella. Collarbone-length hair glistening, the hem of her gray coat brushing over wet cobblestones-identical to the one she’d worn the last time he saw her.
“Emily!”
Emily was alive.
He lunged forward, but she was already slipping into a car.
Lucas barely registered his own movements as he barked at the driver, “Follow that car. To the Carter estate.”
Inside the other vehicle, Emily sat rigid, her knuckles white around her phone.
She’d heard him. Lucas’s voice.
She didn’t know how he’d discovered she was alive, but his presence here was a disaster. With trembling fingers, she called her aunt, Elizabeth Carter. “Elizabeth, Lucas found me. He knows I’m alive.”
A sharp inhale on the other end. Then, steel in Elizabeth’s voice, “Stay calm. He won’t lay eyes on you-I promise you that.”
At the Carter estate, Lucas was met at the gates by Elizabeth.
“Even if you’re going to lie, Mr. Black,” she said coolly, “at least make it believable. You claim Emily is alive? Where’s your
proof?”
Jaw tight, he thrust forward the photo Lillian had given him-Emily and her parents in the airport lounge, dawn light
caressing her beautiful face as she laughed between them.
Her aunt didn’t even glance at it. “I don’t know why you’re obsessed with this delusion. That woman isn’t Emily. And since when did you care whether she lived or died?”
Lucas’s throat locked. “I-”
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After speaking, Mrs. Carter turned away without another glance and closed the gate behind her, walking back toward the
estate.
Lucas instinctively moved to chase after her, but the heavy door shut firmly in his face. He stared at the retreating figure for a long time, his hands at his sides gradually clenching into fists.
No, he couldn’t have been mistaken-that was Emily.
He didn’t understand why Emily refused to see him, or why her family continued to lie to him.
But it didn’t matter. Lucas could wait. He believed that if he waited long enough, Emily would eventually come out to face
him.
3
He stood there for hours, days, weeks-until the hope in his eyes dulled to embers.
Then, just as he’d given up, there she was.
“Emily!” He was running before he knew it, catching her wrist, crushing her against his chest. His voice broke. “Emily… Emily… I found you-” His fingers dug into her coat. “These months without you-I thought I’d gone mad. I thought you
were dead-”
A hundred confessions choked him. All he could rasp was, “I missed you.”
But the “Emily” in Lucas’s arms suddenly lifted her head and looked at him in confusion. “Who are you?”
Lucas stared at her, his face paling with panic. “Emily, it’s me-Lucas, your husband! I-”
The young woman had no patience for his explanation. She shoved him away. “Are you insane? Grabbing random people and spouting nonsense!”
Just then, the Carter family’s steward hurried out and bowed respectfully to the girl. “Welcome home, Miss Carter.”
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