237 Ks Zero Fs Chapter 13
Over the year, I occasionally heard gossip through WhatsApp from old colleagues back in the States.
Apparently, Conor had gone insane looking for me.
My transfer paperwork had been handled discreetly. Management had cooperated by signing NDAs and never told him I’d been posted to London. They let him run around the entire North American continent like a headless fly.
Conor hired private investigators. He scoured nearly every major city in the country.
He quit his shiny position as a partner at the architecture firm. Terminated the lease on our townhouse. Moved into a cold, sterile downtown apartment with zero human warmth.
He’d packed all the clothes I’d left behind, all my used Jo Malone perfume bottles, into a suitcase. He dragged it with him everywhere he went.
He and Hailey had already torn each other apart and severed all contact—I knew that much.
No one ever saw him wear that red Coachella leather cord again.
He’d put his custom platinum wedding band back on.
A year of deterioration had left him gaunt. The ring hung loose on his ring finger, as if it could slip off at any moment.
Old college friends told him to quit the self-indulgent theater. They said if Maya had gone to these lengths to cut all contact, she’d made up her mind. She was never coming back.
This man, who had once been so insufferably arrogant, just sat there with bloodshot eyes. Silent for a long time. Then, choked, he said, “But I can’t get her out of my head.”
Hearing about these belated declarations of “devotion” while sitting in a black cab in London, I felt nothing. Not even a shred of vindictive pleasure. Just absurdity.
I figured he’d go crazy for a while, fail to find me, and then, given his nature as a calculating, self-serving man, gradually return to his respectable life.
Conor had never been a patient man. Never one to endure hardship.
But I didn’t expect that one day, this lunatic would actually follow a trail of breadcrumbs and find his way across the Atlantic to London.