Chapter 17
Every day after that, the calls came. Not from the great Andrew Curt himself, of course—he would never stoop so low—but from his well-paid lackeys in New York. Polished voices, rehearsed empty words. But she barely even heard a single word they said and The moment she heard the name Mr. Curt, she would cut the call without hesitation. There was nothing they could say that she wanted to hear.
She knew why they were calling. Guilt. A shallow, fleeting kind that gnawed at him just enough to make him delegate the burden to others but not enough to face her himself. No, that wouldn't do for the richest man in the country. He could move mountains with a single word, but when it came to an apology, he sent messengers in his place.
And the sad thing? She would have forgiven him. If he had looked her in the eyes, just once, and said, I have to go back. To my life. To my fiancée. If he had asked for her understanding instead of assuming it. Because, of course, she would have understood. Hadn’t she always known this was temporary? That a man like him—polished, powerful, promised to another—was never meant to stay?
But leaving without a word… That was what hurt. The silence he left in his wake, the void where a goodbye should have been. Did she not deserve even that?
The letters piled up at her door, an avalanche of wasted words she never opened. Expensive envelopes embossed with his name, a name she refused to touch. They sat there, untouched, unwanted, until they began to curl at the edges, dampened by the cold night air. When she grew tired of seeing them, she gathered them into a garbage bag—every last one—and threw them away without a second glance.
And just like that, she shut the door on whatever it was they had been.
“You are the stupidest man alive, I swear to God!” Joycelyn Curt’s voice lashed across the hospital room like a whip.
Andrew didn’t flinch. He simply sat there, his back pressed stiffly against the pillows, his hospital gown hanging loose over his broad shoulders. His fingers drummed against his knee, his jaw locked tight. He refused to meet her gaze, refused to acknowledge the anger crackling in the air around them.
She hated seeing him like this—hated that her powerful, brilliant son was reduced to nothing more than a stubborn, brooding shell of himself, all because of some woman.
“Crying over a woman who wouldn’t look at you twice,” she snapped, arms crossed. “I did not raise you to be this weak.”
His head turned slightly, his sharp, ice-blue eyes finally settling on her, and for a fleeting moment, she saw it—that flicker of arrogance, that unbreakable Curt pride that had built their empire. But beneath it, buried so deep that even he probably didn’t want to admit it, was something else. Something raw.
Pain.
It had been a week and a half since her son had returned to her—bruised, scarred, but alive. And all he had spoken about since then was her.
Andrea.
The name alone made Joycelyn’s teeth grind.
He had begged his PA to call her, to explain why he had left so suddenly. Joycelyn had thought it was unnecessary—what woman in her right mind wouldn’t wait for a man like Andrew Curt? But if it helped her son sleep at night, she had allowed it.
It hadn’t helped.
Because Andrea had refused to listen.
“She cuts the call the second she hears we’re from Virex,” his assistant had informed her after three days of trying. Three damn days of endless dialing, of polite, scripted messages, of desperate attempts to get through to a woman who clearly wanted nothing to do with them.
Joycelyn could have sent someone to her office, demanded a face-to-face meeting. But why should she be the one chasing after this woman? Who the hell did Andrea think she was? If she had even one percent of the feelings Andrew clearly harbored for her, she would have been the one reaching out.
Instead, here she was—standing in a hospital room, watching her son unravel.She clenched her fists.
Andrew was not a weak man.He was not some lovesick fool who wallowed in heartbreak.And yet, the past three months had changed him in a way that made her stomach turn.Three months. Three long months where he had been gone.Not just missing. Lost.
He had told her—his voice devoid of emotion, as if reciting something that had happened to someone else—that for ninety days, he had not known who he was. His name, his past, his entire existence had been wiped clean. He had been nothing but a man with no memories, no home, no identity.He had lived like a ghost in the streets of Montera Springs.
Homeless. Sleeping under sagging trampolines, sheets of plastic, and discarded cardboard boxes.Joycelyn had felt something sharp and unforgiving pierce through her chest when he had said it—had imagined her son, her son, the heir to an empire, reduced to something so small, so insignificant.
She had almost lost him.Not just to the accident, but to oblivion itself.
And now that he was back, now that he was Andrew Curt again, here he was—chasing a woman who had already erased him from her life.She exhaled slowly, forcing down the frustration that burned inside her.“Enough,” she said finally, her voice cold, sharp. “You are Andrew Curt. You do not beg. You do not grovel.”
His jaw twitched.And still, he said nothing.Because for all his arrogance, for all his pride, she knew the truth.Andrew was not a man who admitted to suffering.He carried it alone.
Joycelyn wished—prayed—that he had never told her what those months had been like.
She wished she didn’t know about the bench he had called a bed, how he had spent weeks watching the world pass him by, nameless, lost, and invisible. The image haunted her like a living nightmare—her son, the heir to the Curt empire, reduced to a man who didn’t even know himself.
But then he had told her about her.
Andrea.
The woman who had apparently saved him.
He had spoken of her in a way he had never spoken about anyone before, his voice low and rough, filled with something that made her stomach twist—something dangerously close to devotion.
“She was the only thing that made sense,” he had murmured once, half-drugged after a dose of IV fluids, his body too weak to fight against the doctors poking and prodding at him, attaching electrodes to his head as he lay motionless in his hospital bed.
It had taken everything to get him here.
Joycelyn had cried. She had begged. She had blackmailed him with every weapon she had—his father’s legacy, his company, his pride. She had told him that if he didn’t come home, didn’t get checked by a real doctor, then he was proving every single one of his enemies right—that Andrew Curt was nothing but a reckless, irresponsible fool.
She had hated doing it, hated manipulating him like that. But it was the only way.
Because Andrew had refused to believe there was anything wrong with him. Even when he had stared at himself in the mirror of that godforsaken guesthouse in Montera Springs and hadn’t recognized his own reflection. Even when he had forgotten his own name for months.
That, apparently, was not enough to make him ask for help.
But hearing a news reporter on the television in that lobby, talking about the Curt empire, had been enough to make his head split open with pain.
He had gripped the edges of the old wooden counter, his vision going dark at the edges, his heartbeat thundering against his ribs as his past came crashing back to him all at once—like a dam breaking. The ache in his skull had been unbearable, a sharp, relentless pressure like his brain was too full, too much, too loud. He had swayed on his feet, lightheaded, his legs barely holding him up as flashes of his life assaulted him—boardrooms and cityscapes, sleek cars and expensive suits, his name signed on contracts worth billions.
And his mother.
His mother.
Her voice had been the loudest, calling him back like a ghost in his head.
He had barely been able to breathe through the agony, through the overwhelming weight of knowing who he was again.
And yet, through all of it—through the chaos in his skull, the dizziness in his bones, the feeling of his identity snapping back into place like a fractured limb finally resetting—one thought had overpowered everything else.
Andrea.
Andrea had been the only real thing in those lost months.She had been the one constant, the one thing that had felt right when nothing else had.And now, she was alone.He had left her—just vanished in the middle of the night, without a word, without an explanation.
That had been the real reason he had let his mother drag him back to New York. Not because he had wanted to—never because he had wanted to—but because he had to fix this. He had to find out why his mind had broken like that, had to figure out what the hell had happened to him before he could go back to her.He had planned to call her the second he got to New York, to tell her the truth.
But she wouldn’t take his calls.“She cuts the line the moment she hears we’re from Virex,” his assistant had told him, their voice hesitant, careful.She wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t even let him explain.And worse—his mother had forbidden him from using his phone.
The doctors had backed her up, saying he needed rest, saying he needed to heal. Joycelyn had personally ensured that every damn nurse in this hospital knew that Andrew Curt was not to be given his phone under any circumstances.But they couldn’t stop him from writing.
So he wrote.
Letter after letter, his handwriting sharp, precise, controlled.All addressed to Andrea Mercer.All sent to Montera Springs, that cursed little town.He had told her everything.And still—nothing.No reply. No message.She had ignored his letters the same way she had ignored his calls.
Joycelyn had watched it all unfold, had watched the way the rejection dug into him, the way his face remained unreadable but his fingers tightened ever so slightly every time he checked the stack of unopened envelopes at his bedside.
He was not the kind of man to beg.He was Andrew Curt.He had built an empire with his own hands. He had never needed anyone.And yet, here he was.A shell of the man he had been.
His anger burned just beneath the surface, his arrogance still intact, but underneath it—buried deep where no one else could see—was heartbreak.And Joycelyn hated that damn woman for it.Because she had destroyed her son.
There was another tragedy Joycelyn couldn’t forget—not even if she wanted to. Even if her son had pushed it so far from his mind that it barely seemed to exist anymore.
For three years, Andrew had been with Eloise.
She had been everything Joycelyn had envisioned for her son—a polished, successful woman with an empire of her own. She had built a beauty company from the ground up, her business flourishing with the same relentless ambition that Andrew himself had always admired. They had met at a charity gala in Greece, and from that moment, they had been inseparable.
Two months before the accident, they had gotten engaged.
And then, just like that, he had vanished.
For months, Eloise had searched for him, combing through every corner of London, convinced he was there, that something had happened. She had exhausted every contact, every resource, refusing to believe that he had simply disappeared into thin air.
And when they finally found him—when Joycelyn had taken Eloise with her to Montera Springs to bring him home—Andrew had looked at her like she was nothing.
Not even a flicker of recognition.
“I don’t know you,” he had said, his voice disturbingly indifferent.
Eloise had reached for him, her hand trembling, desperate to touch him, to remind him. But he had shrugged her off like she was a stranger on the street.
It had been cruel.
And yet, Eloise hadn’t given up.
She had been at his hospital bedside every day since they had returned to New York, bringing him flowers, speaking to him in soft, hopeful tones, willing him to remember—to feel something, anything.
He had given her nothing.
Joycelyn had heard one of their conversations just the night before, standing outside his hospital room, unseen.
“When you were gone, Chilli missed you too…” Eloise had said quietly, sitting beside his bed, her voice so full of tenderness it made Joycelyn’s heart ache.
Chilli. The dog they had adopted together, a spoiled little thing that Andrew had once doted on—taking him to luxury pet spas, feeding him only the best organic food, acting like the dog was his son.
Eloise had searched Andrew’s face, eyes pleading. “You remember him, don’t you?”
Andrew had been lying back against his pillows, his face unreadable, his expression blank as he stared at the ceiling.
And then, after a long silence—
“Not really.”
His voice had been cold, dismissive.
Lies.
Joycelyn had known it the moment the words had left his mouth.
He did remember.
He remembered Chilli. He remembered Eloise. He remembered the life they had built together, the apartment in London, the engagement, the future they had planned. He knew her.
And yet, he refused to acknowledge it.
Why?The answer was painfully clear.Andrea Mercer.The name he no longer spoke.In the first few days after returning, he had been restless, desperate, demanding.
“Did she call?”“Did she get my letters?”“Did she say anything?”
It had been a constant loop, a relentless obsession, as if he could will her into reaching out just by asking for her enough times. But the days had passed, and Andrea had never responded.Now, that desperation had turned into something else.Silence.He no longer spoke her name.He no longer asked.But Joycelyn could see it.
The way he sat in that hospital bed, staring out the window, expression composed but his hands gripping the blanket just a little too tightly. The way his shoulders stiffened just slightly when the doctors walked in and announced there was still no clear diagnosis. The way he answered every question in clipped, precise words, his voice perfectly even—too even, like a man forcing himself to be unaffected.
And then there was Eloise.
She sat beside him every evening after work, filling the silence with stories from their past, painting pictures of the life they had shared.He barely responded.Sometimes, he would hum in acknowledgment.Sometimes, he would give a single-word reply.Most times, he would just sit there, his jaw tight, looking at everything but her.
________________________________________
It was like she had been in a state of suspended animation, existing rather than living. Days blurred into nights, and time lost all meaning. She drifted through her routine in a daze, waking up just long enough to eat when hunger clawed at her stomach, showering only when the heat became unbearable, brushing her teeth as if her body moved on autopilot, bound by some mechanical habit ingrained too deep to forget.
Everything else had fallen apart.
Dishes stacked high in the sink, greasy and crusted over with days—weeks—of neglect. The garbage overflowed, a pungent reminder that she had long since stopped caring. The floor was littered with stray wrappers, discarded papers, and laundry she hadn’t bothered to fold. She hadn’t washed her hair in nearly a week.
The first week of February arrived, bringing with it an ominous realization—her due date was only weeks away. And still, she had been moving through life like a ghost, untethered, numb.
Something had to change.
With a deep breath, she forced herself into motion. One dish at a time, she worked through the mountain in the sink, scrubbing until her arms ached. She moved slowly, taking breaks every few minutes, her swollen belly making every movement a chore. Finally, she gathered the garbage—heavy, overstuffed black bags—and dragged them toward the door.
Her hand patted her pocket instinctively for the keys.
She pulled the door open.
Sunlight spilled onto the porch, brilliant and golden, drenching the world in a sharp, almost blinding glow. She squinted against it, realizing with a quiet jolt that she hadn’t seen the sun in days.
And then—
she saw him.
Victor Remington, waiting for her.