I wake up smiling and reach out for Lili before I even open my eyes. God, last night. Heaven opened up and swallowed us whole. I’ve never experienced anything like it. In those hours, we didn’t utter a single word but said everything. I saw the future in her eyes. My wife … I’m pretty sure she’s falling in love with me. It’s becoming more apparent every day and I’m trying to keep calm, but she makes it really difficult. She shows me in the way she smiles after I kiss her when she thinks I’m not looking, when she tickles her fingers across my skin when she thinks I’ve fallen asleep, when I wake up in the night and she slides on top of me to get as close as she possibly can…

I reach out further and peek open one eye. The covers on her side are rumpled, but she’s not there. Damn. I’ll never get enough of her. I glance at the clock. It’s a little later than I normally wake up, but she usually sleeps for another hour. I need to get her back in this bed.

I get up, expecting to find her in the kitchen, but it’s empty. I rub the scruff on my chin and start the coffee. She must have gotten an early start with Miss Christine. We talked about having a Game of Thrones marathon later. We’re halfway through the series … I need a haircut because she’s started calling me Drogo.

Sometimes after we’ve had a mind-blowing night, she seems shy in the daylight. I don’t blame her—so much has happened in a relatively short amount of time. It’s an exercise in restraint to give enough to make her want more of me, but also hold back enough to not rush her. I think it’s working. I hope it is.

Once I’m pouring a cup of coffee, I turn and look out at the living room. Something’s off—oh, my favorite picture of us is missing. I look around to see where she moved it and when I can’t find it, I step toward the side table to see if it’s fallen. That’s when I notice a note on the countertop.

I’m still in my euphoric state from our night when I start reading, totally unprepared. When I get to “don’t look for me” I crumple the paper into a tiny ball, but seconds later, I’m too desperate to know what else she said to leave it at that.

She sounds like a stranger. She’ll remember our time with fondness always? Ti sto diaolo?! I read it over and over, looking for clues to what she could be trying to say, what could be hidden or coerced, anything to make this not be true. It doesn’t sound anything like her. I read it again, getting snagged each time on one sentence. I wouldn’t believe she’d written the letter, except for this: You’re the best kind of man. She says that to me all the time.

* * *

Someone took her. I know it. She was forced to write that note. Taken from me against her will. I believe it with everything in me … until I see her leaving with my own eyes. Zed and I watch the surveillance videos all the way through and then rewind to watch again.

“This is on me, Soti. I’m so sorry. Bill was on the clock last night and says he fell asleep,” Zed mutters. “And Joe and Caleb were outside; both said they didn’t see or hear anything unusual. I fired Bill and will be talking to Joe and Caleb again to see if they’ve gotta go, but it’s on me. With her mother’s visit yesterday, I should have stayed up all night making sure nothing happened.”

I ignore him and watch again. She walks boldly and leaves on her own. At least as far as the cameras were able to record, there is no one forcing her to go. No sign of fear in the way she’s moving. She wanted to leave.

Flashes of the way she looked into my eyes last night as she gave me everything play tricks with my mind. She built my world up like an elaborate sandcastle before the tide came crashing in, only to crumble into a lump of wet sand with a single blow.

She made me believe.

Or maybe that was just goodbye.

* * *

After I’ve questioned JT, Miss Jez, and Miss Christine more times than I’d like to admit and they’re in just as much shock as I am, I set my pride aside and go to the police station to talk Rudy into filing a missing persons report. He gets stuck on the fact that she left a note telling me she was leaving, but once he hears about the gunshots, her involvement with Santelli, and the way her mother threatened her a couple of months ago, he reads me the Riot Act for not coming in to chat about all of this sooner. He promises to look into her disappearance, and I promise I’ll be bugging him until he finds her.

Everything inside me rages against letting her go. I need her to look me in the eye and tell me she doesn’t want to be with me. If she can do that, I’ll have to try to accept it. Even though the thought of living without her feels like annihilation.

I’ve been her drone, the male wasp who has only one purpose for his queen. Now that I’ve fulfilled whatever her mission was for me, I can wither up and die.