I Walked Away After Catching My Husband Cheating—Four Years Later, He Met the Twin Sons He Never Knew He Had.

Julian

The whiskey tasted like ash, but then again, everything had tasted like ash for the last four years.

I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of my corner office, staring out at the Manhattan skyline. This was a new building. A new city. I had relocated the headquarters of Foster Meridian to New York three years ago because every street, every restaurant, and every hotel in Chicago felt like a tomb.

“I saw you.”

Her voice. It haunted my dreams. It echoed in the silence of my penthouse. Those three words, spoken with such quiet, devastating finality, were the last I ever heard from my wife.

"Julian?"

I didn't turn around as Marcus, my Vice President, stepped into the office. "What is it, Marcus?"

"The helicopter is ready to take you upstate. Are you sure you want to handle this boutique acquisition personally? It's a tiny property. Barely a blip on our radar."

I took a sip of the amber liquid, the burn grounding me. "I need out of the city. The board members are driving me insane with the European merger. A day in the mountains doing menial paperwork sounds like a vacation."

"Fair enough," Marcus sighed. "The property is called Whispering Pines. The owner is a woman named A. Hayes. She’s agreed to the terms, but she’s fiercely protective of the staff. You’ll need to play nice."

Play nice. I almost laughed. I didn't know how to play nice anymore.

When Audrey vanished, she took my soul with her. The realization of what I had destroyed didn't hit me in waves; it hit me like a freight train. The kiss with Madison had been a pathetic, fleeting moment of ego-stroking during a time when I felt I was losing control of my marriage. I didn't love Madison. I didn't even like her.

I fired Madison the morning after the anniversary. I threw her out of the building with nothing but a severance check and a threat to ruin her career if she ever spoke to me again. But punishing her didn't bring Audrey back.

I hired the best private investigators in the world. I spent millions. But Audrey had meticulously erased her digital footprint. It was as if she had stepped off the edge of the earth.

"I'll be down in five minutes," I told Marcus, finally turning away from the window.

I grabbed my suit jacket from the back of the leather chair. As I walked out, my eyes briefly caught the only personal item in my sterile office: a small, framed polaroid of Audrey laughing on a beach in Malibu during our honeymoon.

I touched the glass, my chest tightening with that familiar, suffocating grief.