Chapter 3
I froze.
So did his assistant.
Stephen had thrown me away, and I had lasted almost three months out there on my own.
By then I had been dead for over a month.
He had never come looking for me.
He had never said a word about me either.
I had assumed he was most of the way to forgetting I existed.
The assistant let the silence run a moment before he answered carefully.
"Mr. Foster, Miss Grant hasn't reached out to me since she left."
Stephen looked thrown, like the answer made no sense to him.
"Not once? She hasn't called you once?"
I couldn't understand why that got to him.
He was the one who told me to go, the day he put me on that plane.
He said not to contact him again, that I should go study, find work, get married, have kids.
Something strange moved across his face, and he said it almost to himself.
"With her temper... she never called to raise hell?"
He probably hadn't noticed that I had stopped raising hell years ago.
It ended when I was 19 and he pulled the ring off my hand and gave it to Emma.
It ended the night I ran out into that rain by myself.
It ended when I had nowhere to go and nobody to go to, and I crawled back to that house and lived off him.
The version of me that used to throw fits over anything never threw another one.
Maybe I imagined it, but for a second his eyes, which never gave anything away, looked wet.
He looked up at that flat gray sky and said something quietly.
"I forgot. She learned to keep quiet a long time ago."
He stood there in front of all that snow for a long while.
Something lonely came over his face.
Eventually he pulled it back in and looked like himself again.
He came down the steps and got in the car.
For the first time in weeks, he looked rattled.
From the front seat his assistant spoke up. "Mr. Foster, do you want to wait for your wife?"
Since the wedding, Stephen had gone in and out of that house with Emma every single day.
He sat in the back and watched the snow come down past the window.
He answered without really focusing. "Don't wait. Em didn't sleep well. Let her rest."
The assistant read something into that and cleared his throat.
They were newlyweds, so nobody would have thought twice about it.
The car pulled up outside the office and his phone rang.
It was my ballet teacher.
Her voice came through fast and worried.
"Mr. Foster, I haven't been able to reach Alysha in over a month.
"She has the competition in Vienna at the end of the month, and she just went dark on me."
Stephen's hand tightened around the phone.
He knew that after my dad died, my teacher was the person I talked to most.
She had known me more than 10 years, half teacher and half friend, and we were close.
The veins stood up on the back of his hand.
His voice stayed level anyway. "Alysha hasn't contacted me since she left."
My teacher's tone turned sharp.
"I've called you a dozen times and you never pick up, so I'm not going to waste words.
"Just tell me where she is and I'll go get her myself."
Stephen went quiet.
It took him a while to answer, and it came out stiff. "I don't know."
He really didn't.
When I found out he was marrying Emma, he told me to move away.
I didn't argue. I bought my own ticket and went.
He had packed a suitcase for me and booked me a flight.
He had lined up a school out there and gotten me an acceptance letter.
I took none of it.
Where I actually went was another matter.
He never asked, and I never told him.
Something had quietly started slipping out of his hands.
Stephen opened his palm and looked down at how empty it was.
That calm, closed-off face of his cracked open without a sound.
Something surfaced in his expression that I had almost never seen on him, and it looked a lot like fear.
He had spent years holding the string on a kite.
Standing there, he worked out that the string had snapped.
My teacher ran hot at the best of times, and her patience had been thin for years.
Him saying he didn't know where I was lit the whole thing up.
Her voice went up. "You don't know? Stephen, Alysha has been gone over four months.
"She wouldn't tell me where she went, and you're her fiancé, and in all that time you never once asked?"
I wanted to tell her that Stephen had not been my fiancé for a long time.
He was Emma's husband now, the wedding had just happened, and my teacher knew all of it.
Stephen didn't correct her.
His voice came out with a shake in it.
"I'll put people on it. She'll turn up."
Then he added something, and it sounded like he was reassuring himself.
"She won't miss the competition. That's always mattered more to her than anything."
My teacher hit the roof.
"Easy for you to say! Do you know how big this country is? Where am I supposed to look?"
She lost hold of it completely. "Stephen, I'm going to say this plain. I have put up with you for years!
"If Alysha isn't back before that competition, I'm putting the video of your engagement to her all over the internet.
"You dumped your fiancée and gave her ring to the woman you married!
"Let everybody see exactly how shameless and cold you really are!"