Nothing.
“Amelie?”
Maybe she’s exploring. I check the theater room. The bar. The second lounge. The guest bedroom. Another guest bedroom. I check my office. She’s not here but something else catches my eye. One of my briefcases is lying on its side, papers spilling onto the floor.
It’s the paperwork for the purchase of her hotel.
Fuck.
Another surprise I had for her. She said she hates surprises, but I was absolutely sure she’d love this one. I’ve spent weeks sneaking around fielding phone calls to push the multiple deals through. I was going to tell her about it tonight.
Surely she’d behappywith this discovery. Over the moon.
Why isn’t she waiting here for me with a huge smile on her exquisite face, beaming at me with unfiltered joy?
It doesn’t look like the booklet of papers has even been opened. There are no hints of a fold around the staples.
She only saw the first page.
Name of Purchaser: Dallas J. Wilder
Name of Establishment: The Hotel Thibodeaux
Bourbon Street
The French Quarter
New Orleans
If she’d flipped to the second page, she would have seen more. Dated earlier this week.
Name of Owner(s): Amelie S. Thibodeaux (99%); Dallas J. Wilder (1%)
Cash payment in full
And if she’d flipped further, she would have seen even more. All of it for her.
My brain scrambles to decode what she might have assumed here. Did she think I bought the hotel … for myself? I realize she has some serious trust issues and for good reason but … didn’t she believeanythingI told her? At all?
Fuck!
She’s mad at me?
She must be more than mad.
If she’s gone and her phone is still here … it’s because she knows I would have tracked her.
She left me? She fucking left me?
No no no no no nono no no no no no noNO.
I grab the stack of papers and fold them as I run, shoving them into the jacket of my pocket. I find her phone and try to unlock it. Maybe her messages will give me some kind of clue as to where she might have gone, if I can only access them. But it’s locked. I don’t even know her birthday, if she might have used the date. How could I not fuckingknowthat? Why didn’t Ifuckingaskher? I remember her mentioning at one point that she’s an Aries, like I am, but that doesn’t help me.
There’s so much left for us to learn about each other, and to get to know. And I want to learnallof it. I want to spend the rest of my life learning everything there is to discover about my perfect, beautiful girl.
But she’s gone.
I jam her phone in my other pocket and I head for the elevator.
