Chapter 39 Taking Leave to Return to Minnesota
For twenty-three years, Nathan had lain awake in the suffocating dark, drowning in a single, agonizing thought.
If I had just gotten on that goddamn train with her.
If he had just pushed aside his lab work and gone back to Minnesota with her that winter, she never would have vanished. Even if danger had come for them on the road, he would have been right there. He could have shielded her. Or, at the very least, they could have died together.
Instead, he had been left behind—his soul suspended in a torturous purgatory, adrift and rotting, finding absolutely no peace.
"But I want to stay for a few days," Chloe said, a flicker of worry crossing her face as they stood outside her office building. "Won't taking that much time off interfere with your research?"
"It's fine," Nathan replied instantly, his voice a low, unyielding vow. "I have time."
"Alright then!" Chloe beamed.
She was deeply, intensely relieved. Truthfully, she was terrified of making the journey back to her hometown alone. The world was still too alien, and the ghost of her past trauma lingered in her bones.
"But Chloe..." Nathan looked down at her, his dark eyes tracing the delicate lines of her face. "Are you truly prepared for this?"
Chloe hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then, she nodded, her eyes hardening with resolve. "Yes. I'm fine. With you and Mason beside me, I'm not afraid anymore. I feel like my courage is coming back. I'm ready to face them."
Nathan’s chest tightened with a fierce, devastating pride. "You're incredible, Chloe. Alvin and Carol would be so endlessly proud of you."
"Of course they would!" she declared, dramatically waving her hands to lighten the heavy mood. "I'm the absolute best! Nothing can keep me down!"
"Looking a little too energetic for a Tuesday morning, aren't we? Guess you haven't been working hard enough."
Michael strolled over from the underground parking garage, catching Chloe mid-pep talk. With a coffee in one hand and his usual designer briefcase in the other, he couldn't resist taking a shot at her.
"I took work home last night, you tyrant!" Chloe shot back.
"That’s literally in your job description." Michael rolled his eyes, but the moment he turned to Nathan, his entire demeanor shifted. His cynical edge vanished, replaced by an absolute, unwavering respect. "Good morning, Mr. Archer."
"Good morning, Michael," Nathan greeted him with equal, steady warmth. "I have to head to the lab. I'll leave her in your capable hands today."
"Rest assured, she's safe with me," Michael promised, his eyes shining with uncharacteristic sincerity.
As they stood on the freezing pavement watching the black Bentley glide away into the city traffic, Michael let out a low whistle. "Mr. Archer is ruthlessly elegant. The man has terrifyingly good taste. What brand was that trench coat he was wearing? I need to buy it."
Chloe turned to him, her eyes narrowing playfully. "You want to buy the exact same coat?"
Michael nodded vigorously.
"Absolutely not," Chloe smirked, turning on her heel to walk toward the glass doors. "Only my husband gets to be that handsome."
"You are so damn ungrateful!" Michael called out, matching her pace as they entered the lobby. "Do you have amnesia again? Do you not remember who forced him to come find you last night? If it weren't for me meddling, you'd still be crying in your cubicle!"
"Thanks a lot, Cupid!"
Michael snorted coldly, entirely unimpressed by her sarcasm. As they stepped into the empty elevator, he leaned against the mirrored wall, lowering his voice. "By the way. Is the kid adopted?"
"No," Chloe answered, a profound, fragile joy blooming in her chest. "He's my brother."
Michael blinked. "Huh?"
"My real, biological brother. He's the ultimate gift my parents left behind for me." Chloe pressed her hand over her heart, her voice thick with emotion. "He is my family."
Michael scoffed, his expression instantly darkening into a cynical sneer. "What's so great about having a brother?"
Chloe frowned. "What do you know about it?"
"How could I not know? I have two of them," Michael said lazily, flicking a piece of lint off his lapel. "You've just never actually had to live with yours, which is why you romantically view him as a 'gift'."
"I take it you and your brothers don't get along?"
"I don't get along with anyone except Nathan," Michael stated flatly. He didn't even want to think about his two greedy half-brothers, who spent every waking hour scheming for ways to bleed his bank accounts dry. Just mentioning them soured his morning.
"I thought you and I got along pretty well," Chloe teased.
"That is a massive delusion," Michael shot her a sideways glare. "I only tolerate you because Nathan is obsessed with you."
With that, he stepped out of the elevator onto their floor, not bothering to hold the door.
Unfazed by his prickly exterior, Chloe trailed right behind him. "Well, for Nathan's sake, how about you approve a week of PTO for me? I need to go back to Minnesota to see my parents' graves."
Michael stopped by his office door, raising a sharp eyebrow. "You've barely been at this agency for four weeks, and you already want a week off?"
"Special circumstances call for special treatment," Chloe declared with absolute, righteous indignation.
Michael stared at her, doing the mental math. "Three days. Max. And only for the sake of—"
"Nathan, I know. Thank you!" Chloe beamed, cutting him off before retreating to her desk.
Across the city, Nathan pulled the Bentley into the sprawling, state-of-the-art biotechnology park heavily subsidized by the municipal government. His core research laboratory, along with several closely collaborating pharmaceutical firms, was headquartered here.
As he strode through the sleek, glass-walled lobby in his tailored coat, he offered polite, brief smiles to the colleagues greeting him.
The moment the elevator doors closed behind him, an internal messaging group on the junior researchers' floor immediately blew up.
User 1: "Did you guys see Dr. Archer? He is in a dangerously good mood today."
User 2: "Totally! He actually smiled at me in the lobby. My knees literally went weak. How does a man look that devastatingly charismatic when he's just holding a briefcase?"
User 3: "He's a literal silver fox. If it weren't for the age gap and the teenage son, women would be throwing themselves at his feet."
User 4: "Please. Age and baggage aren't the issue. The real problem is that no one here has a death wish. Nobody dares to make a move on Dr. Archer while Anna is breathing down his neck."
User 1: "Facts. Anna marked that territory years ago. We all have the fantasy, but absolutely none of the guts to cross her."
Of course, Nathan was completely oblivious to the thirsty gossip of his junior staff.
But as he walked down the executive corridor and stopped in front of Anna’s frosted-glass office door, he knew exactly what he had to face.
To claim that he had never once considered giving up on Chloe during those twenty-three years would be a lie.
Time and time again, he would chase a lead, only to crash into a brick wall of despair. On the agonizing anniversaries of her disappearance, and particularly at his mother’s deathbed, he had hovered on the precipice of surrender. He had thought about forcing himself to stop searching, to settle down, and to just let some other woman fill the gaping, bleeding hole in his house.
And Anna had been the vulture patiently circling his grief for two decades.
In her youth, Anna had been stunning—widely regarded as the untouchable beauty of their medical program. They shared the same academic advisor and were frequently paired up for grueling, late-night lab projects.
Even before Chloe vanished, she had been ferociously wary of the woman. Chloe used to pace his dorm room, wildly accusing Anna of having impure motives. She had pointed out how Anna used "urgent data reviews" as an excuse to call him at 2:00 AM, how she looked at his mouth when he spoke, and how she constantly manufactured reasons to casually brush against his arm.
"That woman looks way too old to be throwing herself at you. It's disgusting," Chloe used to spit, her eyes flashing with pure, territorial rage.
Back then, Nathan had just smiled, deeply amused and secretly thrilled by Chloe’s fierce possessiveness.
But the moment he smiled, it would drive Chloe insane. She would march over, grab his face between her hands, and issue a lethal warning: "You are not allowed to be alone with her! You don't eat with her, and you don't help her with her stupid experiments! Do not engage with her at all, Nathan. Do you hear me?"
And Nathan, completely enslaved by her, would just nod. "I'll do whatever you say, baby."
Truthfully, his brilliant brain was utterly blind to other women's advances. He had just viewed Anna's behavior as networking. But after Chloe made her boundaries clear, he had actively dreaded answering Anna's calls.
Then, Chloe vanished.
And Anna seized her moment.
She pursued him relentlessly for years. Their colleagues constantly tried to matchmake them, insisting they were the perfect academic power couple. Nathan shut it down brutally every single time, making it unequivocally clear he would never look at her.
Anna finally gave up at thirty and moved abroad. But the second she heard about the mudslide that nearly killed him, she rushed back to Chicago. She played the devoted savior, hovering by his hospital bed and helping manage a traumatized little Mason.
Even his own grieving parents had begged him to just accept Anna—if not for himself, then to give Mason a mother.
He had stared at the ceiling of his hospital room, his brain severely damaged, his body broken, and seriously considered it.
But he had ultimately refused.
Nathan raised his knuckle and rapped sharply against Anna's door. It was time to permanently sever the last lingering thread.