His Automated Reply Cost Him His Wife Chapter 13

His Automated Reply Cost Him His Wife Chapter 13

Over the course of that year, I occasionally received emails from former colleagues in the Bay Area.

Apparently, Ethan had gone mad looking for me.

He had sold our house in Marin, resigned from his position as partner at the firm, and hired private investigators, nearly turning the entire West Coast upside down.

But I had covered my tracks, and my new company’s senior leadership had upheld their professional ethics. No one told him where I had gone. So he stumbled around North America like a headless fly.

They said he packed all the clothes and design books I’d left behind into boxes, rented a van, and drove aimlessly from state to state, a ghost hauling the relics of his past.

He and Lena had fallen out completely, which didn’t surprise me.

He had started wearing the custom platinum wedding band from our marriage again.

After a year of self-inflicted torment, he had become so thin that the ring no longer fit. It sat loosely on his finger, and he’d had to wrap a clumsy strip of white medical tape around the base to keep it from slipping off.

People from our old social circle told him to stop the self-indulgent drama. They said that since I had vanished so completely, I had obviously made up my mind and would never be back.

That man, once so arrogant, would just sit there with bloodshot eyes and choke out, “But she’s all I can think about.”

As I sat before the floor-to-ceiling windows of my Chicago apartment, watching the ceaseless flow of the city below and reading about this belated “devotion,” I felt no pleasure. Only a sense of absurdity.

I had assumed he would go mad for a while, fail to find me, and then, with his personality that always prioritized comfort and dignity, slowly return to his polished life.

After all, Ethan had never been a patient man.

But I never expected that one day, this madman would follow the faintest of threads and find his way to Chicago.