The Lost Decade Chapter 05

The Lost Decade Chapter 05

Wyatt’s expression froze solid.

“Mom, is this some other scheme Cora cooked up with you? Get her in here. I need to talk to her.”

Linda studied his face seriously.

When she saw he wasn’t joking in the slightest, genuine alarm flashed in her eyes.

She hurriedly hit the call button.

“Doctor! Doctor! Something’s wrong with my son’s head!”

The veins on Wyatt’s forehead bulged.

“Mom! Enough!”

“All I did was make her apologize to Hayley. Did she really have to go this far? Even dragging you into it?”

Linda swallowed hard, her expression utterly earnest and laced with sympathy.

“Darling, are you… trapped in some kind of delusion you can’t get out of?”

“Cora Dawson-ten years ago, right before senior prom, she just vanished. No one ever heard from her again. You were a wreck over it for a long time, remember?”

“What’s going on with you? Don’t scare me!”

Wyatt was stunned.

He stared into his mother’s desperately anxious eyes and finally realized-something was very, very wrong.

“What do you mean ten years?”

“We’ve been married for ten years!”

He shouted as he frantically searched his phone for Cora’s number. But the moment he opened his contacts, he went rigid.

That name-the one always pinned to the top, marked with a heart emoji-wasn’t there.

It felt like a sledgehammer had just slammed into his brain.

He tried to dial the number he knew by heart.

The response was a cold, mechanical voice: “The number you have dialed is not in service.”

“No way-”

He scrolled desperately through everything on his phone. Photo albums, social media, messages-he searched for any photograph of them together, any shred of proof that they had ever been together.

Nothing.

In his entire photo gallery, Cora Dawson didn’t exist as a person.