She Didn’t Fix Her Reputation. She Threw It Away. Chapter 17

She Didn’t Fix Her Reputation. She Threw It Away. Chapter 17

In the days that followed, Beckett became a ghost.

He stopped going to parties. He stopped answering his phone.

He spent most of his time shut in his apartment, living on whiskey and regret.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” one of his friends asked, confused, over the phone. “You were always complaining about how boring she was, like a nun in couture. Now that she’s gone, you and Anya can finally have some real fun. You should be celebrating.”

Happy?

He wasn’t happy. He was miserable.

Every day, he’d open the photo gallery on his phone.

There was only one picture of her left.

He’d taken it secretly, just before their engagement. She was looking down at a document, the afternoon sun catching the side of her face, her expression quiet and focused.

He stared at that photo for hours, as if he could will her back into existence.

But a day passed, then two, then a week.

She didn’t come back.

His father called again.

This time, his voice was glacial.

“What exactly did you do to that Wells girl? The Blake Group’s stock has dropped twenty percent in three days. Do you have any idea what that means?”

He had no answer.

What could he say?

That he’d orchestrated a PR nightmare to impress a model, throwing his own fiancée under the bus?

That in a pathetic attempt to prove his own virility, he had single-handedly destroyed a multi-generational business alliance and torched his own future?

He started sending emails into the void.

He left rambling, desperate voicemails on her disconnected number.

It was like screaming into a black hole. Not a single echo came back.

He had to see her.

He had to.