Chapter 6

Mia's POV

I froze completely.

"When are you coming back...?" His voice carried a fragile, desperate pleading I had never heard before.

The cool, rational Logan Davis—the man who thought uttering a single romantic word to me was a waste of time—was now whimpering in his sleep, begging another woman to return.

The driver clearly heard it too. He glanced into the rearview mirror, his expression shifting into awkward discomfort. To cut through the suffocating tension, he cleared his throat and quietly turned up the car heater.

The warm air blew across my face, yet I felt an icy chill seep straight into my bones.

It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of freezing ice water over my head, extinguishing the very last, fragile ember of hope I possessed.

I didn't shove him away, nor did I throw a fit. I merely looked down at my hand trapped in his tight grasp. He was holding on so hard, as if desperate to brand someone else's name into my flesh and bone.

A sudden urge to laugh bubbled up.

So it was true what they said: a drunk mind speaks a sober heart.

When sober, I was "Mia," the convenient stand-in.

When drunk, stripped of his rational veneer, I became "Clara," the woman he actually loved.

Back at the apartment, I used every ounce of my strength to haul Logan onto the bed. I didn't fetch warm water to wipe his face, nor did I go to the kitchen to brew him honey water. I simply stood by the bed, looking down at the man with his furrowed brow, before turning and walking out of the bedroom, not even bothering to pull the blanket over him.

Three in the morning.

I sat alone in the office chair in the study. In the pitch-black room, the faint blue glow of the computer monitor illuminated my pale face.

Earlier, while helping Logan settle in, a folded flyer had slipped out of his coat pocket. It was a ticket stub for a photography exhibition dated two weeks ago, on a Saturday. That Saturday, Logan had told me he was traveling out of state for a critically important industry conference.

My fingers clicked the mouse mechanically. I had guessed the password to his private laptop—the one he had never allowed me to touch.

It wasn't his birthday, nor was it mine. It was a date from seven years ago.

Opening the browser, I brought up the search history.

Instead of dry architectural files, the screen filled with an obsessive, nauseating list of search terms:

*Clara Vance photography exhibition*

*Clara Vance Paris*

*Clara Vance return*

*Clara Vance interview*...

The earliest search dated back three years ago, the exact month I had agreed to start dating him. The latest one was from two weeks ago.

He had been watching her the entire time. Every single day of our three years together, while playing the role of a devoted fiancé to me on the surface, he was scouring every corner of the internet for any trace of that woman.

Two weeks ago, Clara had returned to hold her debut solo photography exhibition.

He had canceled our weekend appointment for a wedding dress fitting, lying that he had a conference, just to go see her show. Like a shadow hiding in the crowd, he had watched his beloved girl shine under the spotlights, then carried that crumpled ticket stub back home to me.

Staring at the blinding lines of text on the screen, my dry eyes could shed no more tears. My hands were steady—so steady it frightened me. I closed the tabs one by one, then clicked shut down.

The moment the screen went dark, the study plunged into total blackness.

I didn't turn on the lights, nor did I return to the bedroom. Sitting like a soulless statue, I stayed there in the dark.

From three in the morning until the sky turned gray, until the first ray of dawn broke through the clouds and illuminated my face.

Overnight, the Mia who had spent three years trailing behind Logan, looking up to him, loving him, and finding joy for days over a single compliment from him—had died.