The doorbell startled him the next morning. A courier handed him a bouquet wrapped in plain brown paper.
The paper was addressed to Clara in a tidy, unfamiliar script. He stared at the flowers, his confusion twisting quickly into a sharp coil of suspicion. Why would someone send her a bouquet now? It wasn’t her birthday, or their anniversary, or any date he could recall.
With trembling fingers, he tore open the small card to find nothing but a short, handwritten note—warm, affectionate, and utterly unsigned. His mind raced through terrible possibilities. Was this from a concerned friend? A secret admirer? Was she meeting someone behind his back? The timing felt impossibly pointed, a taunt delivered to his doorstep.
His call to the florist yielded little; the clerk explained the order had been placed by a man who paid in cash and hadn’t left details. The explanation barely soothed him. If anything, it made the flowers feel like a deliberate clue he wasn’t interpreting correctly. He imagined Clara planning a secret departure, receiving private messages, or slipping away to meetings. Every explanation felt more unnerving than the last. His thoughts tangled into a thick web of fear, connecting unrelated dots into a pattern he couldn’t bear to ignore.
Later, when his friend Leo offered logical, benign explanations, Adam barely heard him. The unknown felt too heavy, too urgent to dismiss with reason. How could she leave in such a hurry without a single word? Driven by a gnawing panic, Adam reopened Clara’s old message threads, rereading each one with obsessive precision. This time, a few vague messages from her caught his eye—brief mentions of “meeting soon,” “same place as last time,” “don’t worry about it.” They were innocuous sentences he’d glossed over before, but now they glowed with ominous implication. Were they meant for him, or for someone else entirely? The ambiguity was a torture.
He pictured Clara sneaking around, meeting someone secretly, slipping away without a word. The thought burned. What if the reason she hadn’t returned was that she was with someone else? Someone she trusted more?