: Chapter 10
L’After
After landing in Shadowgrass, the first thing Nathen did was to open his phone, only to find that his
mother had made dozens of missed calls and hundreds of unread messages.
Looking at the dense red dots, his heart tightened instantly. He was about to call back and ask, but when he looked up, he saw his mother waiting at the arrival gate.
She seemed to have not slept all night, looking extremely haggard, with a gaze that was both
startled and bewildered.
“Nathen! Melanie wasn’t at home, where could she have gone? Don’t you know?”
Upon hearing these words, Nathen’s mental construction on the plane collapsed instantly.
He didn’t even bother to pick up his luggage, ran out of the arrival gate like crazy, with an
expression of disbelief in his eyes.
“Not at home? How is that possible!”
Hearing the tone of her son, Nathen, Tara, his mother, also realized that something big had
happened, and she quickly asked all the doubts buried in her heart.
“I went home and didn’t see Melanie. I searched the entire house several times and found that her
things were all gone. There was not a single piece of clothing in the wardrobe, and all the little trinkets and snacks that she usually bought were empty. Did you guys have a fight?”
Those memories that were unconsciously ignored by Nathen slowly resurfaced during these few
inquiries.
He remembered the things that Melanie had been cleaning before going to the cemetery.
She would throw away a small portion every day, and although he saw it, he didn’t pay much attention to it, his mind and eyes were only focused on the trip he had planned with Kenna for the
next month.
What she threw away, was not useless things as she said in her mouth, but all her belongings?
Was she originally planning to leave him?
After realizing this, Nathen stood frozen in place, feeling as if he had fallen into an icy abyss.
Suddenly, before parting, the last look she gave him came back to his mind.
This time, he finally understood what that fleeting sense of something being wrong was before.
He walked resolutely, and Melanie did not ask him where he was going, nor did she try to stop him.
The
The emotions carried in those eyes, rather than being described as calm, could be better described
as indifference.
1/3
Yes, indifference, the indifference of looking at strangers and not caring.
Why would such a look appear on Melanie?
He first became aware of this problem.
On the way back, Nathen desperately tried to recall the events that had happened recently,
attempting to figure out when Melanie had started looking at him with such eyes.
In the cemetery, he left her alone in the rain, and there was emptiness in her eyes.
During those days at home, she deliberately avoided his attempts to reconcile, always keeping her
head down and remaining silent.
On the day when the shopping mall caught fire, he tightly embraced Kenna, who lay on the ground with bruises all over her body. In her eyes, there was a calm and distant look that had long been
expected.
Further back, his memory became increasingly hazy, and he could no longer recall the details of
their interactions.
He only remembered the happy and relaxed moments he had with Kenna.
I couldn’t remember at all what Melanie was doing back then.
The jumbled and intertwined memories kept flashing in Nathen’s mind, slowly giving rise to numerous thoughts that terrified him.
He seemed to have guessed why Melanie suddenly disappeared.
She must have realized his ambiguous behavior with Kenna, which was somewhere between being..
friends and being lovers.
This idea took root completely when Nathen returned home.
He first discovered that this apartment, which was missing a lot and was half empty, was different
from the cozy little home in his memory.
Before this, he had no awareness.
