Chapter 67 Official Notice from Pine Grove County
"Hello, is this Nathan Archer?"
"This is me."
"Mr. Archer, this is the Pine Grove County Sheriff's Office. Sir, has your wife, Chloe, been officially listed as missing for the past twenty-three years?"
"Yes."
"Sir... we found a crushed vehicle at the absolute bottom of a deep canyon during the new construction along Interstate 321. The VIN has been confirmed as the commercial transport vehicle that went missing all those years ago. All twenty occupants inside, including your wife, perished on impact. Please accept our deepest, most profound condolences. If it is convenient for you... please come to the county morgue to officially identify the remains and take care of the necessary formalities."
"...Understood."
A harsh, monotonous beep echoed from the heart monitor.
Mason sat completely frozen in a plastic chair beside the hospital bed, gazing blankly at his father's pale, agonizingly frail form. The teenager's eyes were violently red-rimmed, his throat completely locked in absolute silence.
The figure lying in the stark white bed was horrifyingly emaciated. His once-dark hair was heavily streaked with gray and completely limp. His eyes were tightly shut, his cheekbones dangerously hollow. Countless plastic tubes from various humming machines were aggressively taped to his withered, bruised arms.
The heavy ward door clicked open softly. Dr. Willard Ramirez, the chief of neurology, entered quietly and asked, "How is Nathan doing today?"
Mason slowly shook his head, refusing to look away from his dad. "Exactly the same as always."
"Let me examine him." Dr. Ramirez approached the bedside. After conducting a series of clinical checks, shining a penlight into Nathan's unresponsive pupils and checking his vitals, the doctor let out a heavy sigh. "Nathan's body is completely, systemically shutting down. His continued stay in this ICU offers very limited medical options."
Mason finally looked up at the doctor, his young eyes filled with a suffocating, absolute despair.
Dr. Ramirez placed a heavy, sympathetic hand firmly on Mason's tense shoulder. "Prepare yourself, son."
"I understand," Mason nodded, his voice cracking into a hoarse whisper.
After Dr. Ramirez quietly left the room, Mason turned his gaze back to his father in the hospital bed. His chest ached so violently it felt as if his heart were being slowly, deliberately crushed in a vice.
Mason had always fundamentally known that Nathan was a deeply unhappy, permanently melancholy man. His father's physical health had been incredibly fragile ever since surviving a catastrophic brain surgery following a landslide when Mason was just a toddler, though he had generally remained stable enough to work.
But several years ago, the phone had rung. Nathan had received the brutal, official call informing him to drive up to Pine Grove County and finally claim the skeletal remains of his dead wife.
Nathan had driven up there completely alone.
When he returned to Chicago three days later, he was fundamentally broken. He was a hollow walking corpse, a terrifying, silent shell of his former self.
He had silently carried a heavy, polished urn into their old family home—the exact same empty house where he and Chloe had originally planned to spend their lives.
Mason had been too young at the time to completely grasp the absolute, reality-shattering depth of Nathan's grief.
Everyone in their circle had logically assumed that, after twenty-three agonizing years of silence, Chloe couldn't possibly still be alive. No matter how deeply Nathan grieved, they assumed he had already mentally prepared himself for the inevitable reality of her death.
Mason had naively believed that, too.
But at some point, a few months after the funeral, Mason began to notice Nathan acting deeply, terrifyingly strange. He started frequently talking out loud in empty rooms, his voice incredibly soft and tender, as if he were carrying on full conversations with someone completely invisible.
His erratic behavior grew exponentially worse. One afternoon, a deeply concerned Michael had pulled Mason aside and strongly suggested that Nathan needed to see a clinical psychiatrist immediately.
However, when Michael had tried to intervene, Nathan had simply smiled at him and completely seriously ordered the executive to "stop worrying about me and just focus on taking care of Chloe at the agency."
A week later, Nathan had aggressively called Anna Merrill into his office. He had completely coldly warned her not to entertain any more unrealistic, pathetic hopes, and explicitly ordered her to stop aggressively bothering Chloe. He told her, with absolute, terrifying conviction, that he could never love her.
Nathan had even taken Chloe's urn back to her hometown in Minnesota completely alone. Although he had already formally buried her remains in an expensive plot he had purchased decades ago, he came back to the mansion and cheerfully told Mason that Chloe was finally coming to live with them.
He had sat Mason down in the living room, speaking incredibly gently to the confused teenager. He aggressively promised that, even with Chloe finally back in their lives, he would treat Mason just as kindly as before. Nathan had desperately, practically begged Mason not to oppose their relationship.
Only in that terrifying, surreal moment did Mason finally realize that his brilliant, genius father was profoundly, catastrophically ill.
Nathan's shattered brain truly, fundamentally could not accept the absolute reality that Chloe was dead.
In his completely fractured mind, she had miraculously returned from the train crash entirely unchanged from twenty-three years ago: just as young, vibrant, and fiercely beautiful as ever.
The emergency psychologist had later explained it to a horrified Mason and Michael in private. Nathan loved Chloe so completely, with such a terrifying, agonizing depth, that the trauma of finally holding her bones had completely broken his psyche. To survive the grief, his subconscious violently refused to accept her death. In his complex, perfectly constructed delusion, time had completely frozen for her at the exact moment she boarded that train.
In Nathan's mind, she remained twenty-four years old forever—eternally youthful, utterly perfect, her appearance never aging a single day.
Yet, even within his own protective fantasy, Nathan's brilliant mind still violently tortured him. He felt deeply conflicted and constantly tormented by his own aging body. He had grown old, his hair turning gray, while she remained perfectly young. Would she still love him? Would she be completely disgusted by his age? Was it fundamentally selfish of him to trap her in a marriage with an old man?
Mason had spent months helplessly watching his father struggle entirely alone with this invisible, agonizing turmoil. The teenager had even caught Nathan quietly sobbing in his dark bedroom, completely paralyzed by the fear that his imaginary wife would reject him. Mason had thought his father was the most pitiful, tragic man on earth.
He was so incredibly devoted, so fundamentally loyal. If Chloe could actually come back as a ghost, how the hell could she not love him?
The most terrifying part was that, apart from completely hallucinating his dead wife's presence, Nathan appeared perfectly, clinically normal. He ran his massive pharmaceutical lab exactly as usual. He taught his advanced medical seminars brilliantly. He interacted with corporate investors logically and coherently. Only occasionally would he turn his head and gently whisper a joke to thin air, making him appear just a bit eccentric to strangers.
Michael had violently insisted that Nathan take an immediate, indefinite medical leave of absence from the university to be forcefully institutionalized for psychiatric treatment.
However, Mason had fiercely fought Michael on it. The teenager firmly believed that perhaps allowing his father to drown in this beautiful, immersive fantasy wasn't actually so bad.
Because the Nathan who was completely lost in his delusion was fundamentally different. He was infinitely gentler. He smiled so much more often. And for the first time in Mason's entire life, his father's dark eyes actually held the brilliant, undeniable glow of absolute happiness.
Later that year, in the timeline of Nathan's beautiful fantasy, he and Chloe had finally, officially gotten back together. They were living every single day in pure, unadulterated joy. Nathan had even gone to the store and completely filled the nursery with expensive baby clothes, excitedly telling Mason that Chloe was finally pregnant. He had sat on the sofa and seriously asked Mason if he would prefer a little brother or a little sister.
With hot, agonizing tears silently welling in his eyes, Mason had forced a smile and replied, "I want a little sister, Dad."
Nathan had beamed brilliantly, completely overjoyed. "I like girls, too."
Then, Nathan had turned his head, gazing tenderly at the empty air right beside him on the couch. "But a boy would be completely fine, too. I'd love absolutely either."
At home, Mason had tried his absolute hardest to perfectly play along with Nathan's broken mind, violently pretending that Chloe was physically sitting right there with them at the dinner table.
Outside the house, Michael cooperated completely as well. Whenever Nathan visited the marketing agency, Michael would solemnly promise him, "You can rest assured, Nathan. Chloe is in excellent hands with me here. I'll make sure she doesn't overwork herself."
Only hearing that explicit confirmation allowed Nathan to go back to his lab with absolute peace of mind.
In Nathan's corporate lab, Anna Merrill had still been deeply, fundamentally hurt by his brutal rejection, but her heart had completely broken when she realized the depth of his insanity. She felt only a profound, tragic tenderness toward him now.
She played along flawlessly, too. She had stood in his office, explicitly apologizing to the empty air next to him for interfering in his relationship with Chloe, and gracefully wished them a happy marriage.
Even Nathan's old, wealthy university classmates cooperated completely. At their alumni gatherings, they all violently pretended that Chloe was sitting right there beside him, constantly raising their glasses to declare that Nathan and Chloe were the absolute most perfect, enviable couple in Chicago.