Officer Higgins said, “We’ve traced her. Let us assure you first that she is safe.” Adam could barely hear the words through the sudden, deafening throbbing in his own ears. “She has changed cities and is working there. She states she left of her own accord a month ago. The address you found was for an apartment she was considering renting, but she decided against it.”
The words hit him with a force that stole his breath, leaving him suspended in a silence he didn’t understand. *Why him? Why wouldn’t she talk to him?*
Then, suddenly, like shards of ice breaking loose from a frozen pane, Adam’s memories flickered to life—Clara packing boxes in the study weeks ago, her quiet but firm voice explaining she needed space, her hands trembling slightly as she said a final goodbye. He had shut it all out, clinging instead to the hollow routines of a life that no longer existed. He remembered walking away, refusing to hear her last words, burying everything under the desperate insistence that they were fine. He had replaced the reality of their breakup with a denial so complete it had felt like the only truth.
The frantic panic he’d carried for days collapsed inward, transforming into a grief so deep and sudden he couldn’t breathe. Clara hadn’t vanished, hadn’t been threatened or kidnapped. She had simply left, and he had refused, with every fiber of his being, to accept it.
When Leo arrived, he sat beside him on the curb without speaking, a steady presence in the midst of Adam’s unraveling. Leo hadn’t known about the breakup; Adam had told no one, as if saying it aloud would make it real. The weight of that simple, awful truth finally settled into the space Adam had been so desperately trying to fill with theories and investigations.
With shaking hands, Adam agreed to the officers’ suggestion to speak with a therapist. He needed to understand how he had blinded himself so fully, how he had mistaken profound grief for a solvable mystery and her deliberate silence for imminent danger. The prospect of healing felt impossibly far away, but it was now a stark necessity.
He eventually apologized to the officers, his voice breaking, stating he was grateful Clara was safe but utterly devastated by the finality of it all. There was no grand mystery left to solve, only a plain truth he’d refused to face until it towered over him, undeniable.