Chapter 88 Bonus Chapter 16: Only One Chloe

Chapter 88 Bonus Chapter 16: Only One Chloe
2002 · Winter
Dawn heard the news from her advisor.
She was in the lab that day, recording a new set of data, when he pushed open the door with a grave expression. Dawn rarely saw him look like that. He was usually cheerful, the kind of professor who made terrible science jokes and kept a poster on his office door that read KEEP CALM AND DO SCIENCE.
“Nathan’s wife disappeared,” he said. “He’s taking an extended leave. The rest of you will take over his experiments for now.”
Dawn’s pen stopped moving.
“Wife?”
Nathan was married?
When had that happened?
“Yes. They hadn’t been married long.” Her advisor sighed. “The girl went home for the holiday. She disappeared on the way back. Poor thing. So young…”
Dawn stood there as a low ringing filled her skull.
The centrifuge spun behind her with a steady hum. Outside the lab windows, the sky had already darkened. Winter days ended early. It was barely past four, and the streetlights had begun to glow, warm orange beneath the gray sky.
Dawn looked at those lights and thought that somewhere, maybe Nathan was driving under them right now.
Looking for her.
Looking for the woman named Chloe.
She felt cold all at once.
Not because of the lab air-conditioning.
Because some place inside her had gone suddenly empty.
Dawn went to see Nathan at the hospital because she thought she could comfort him.
She thought he would be crying. Breaking down. Needing someone beside him.
But when she opened the hospital room door, Nathan sat beside the bed with his phone in his hand, dialing the same number again and again.
“The number you have dialed is currently unavailable.”
Again.
And again.
The same recorded voice every time.
His face held no expression.
Not calm.
Empty.
Like a house that had been completely cleared out, doors and windows thrown open, wind moving through rooms where nothing remained to stop it.
“Nathan,” Dawn asked softly, “are you okay?”
He looked up at her.
That look made Dawn’s chest tighten.
It was not grief. Not anger. Not despair.
It was absence.
As if the person had been scraped out of him and only the shell had been left behind.
She had never seen eyes like that.
Eyes like that did not belong in the world of the living.
“You should eat something.” Dawn set the fruit she had brought on the table.
Nathan shook his head.
“If she doesn’t come back, I can’t eat.”
Dawn’s hand stilled.
She had no answer for that.
Only then did she understand: in Nathan’s mind, there was no version of the story in which Chloe was dead.
He believed, stubbornly and completely, that she was alive.
That she would come home.
That kind of certainty frightened Dawn.
Not because she was afraid of him.
Because she was afraid of the love itself.
Its weight. Its depth. The terrifying way it refused to move.
She had never known a person could love another person like that.
Love them so much that without them, even eating lost its purpose.
Dawn stood beside the bed and looked at him.
The room was quiet except for the soft beep of the monitor. Beyond the window, the sky was gray, and a few birds crossed it like small dark scratches against paper.
For one foolish, shameful second, she wanted to ask him: If I disappeared, would you look for me like this too?
But she did not ask.
Because she already knew the answer.
No.
No one would.
In this world, there was only one Chloe.
Only one woman he could love like that.
2003 · Summer
Dawn was the one who offered to go to Detroit with Nathan to look for leads.
She told herself it was practical. She had a car. She knew the area better than he did. She could help him ask questions, cover more streets, make the search more efficient.
Those were all reasonable explanations.
None of them were the real one.
The real reason was uglier, smaller, and much more human: she thought the long drive might put her closer to him.
She thought that if they spent hours together in the same car, if they walked the same blocks and knocked on the same doors, if she stood beside him long enough, he might finally see her.
Not as a classmate. Not as a colleague. Not as someone useful.
Her.
Once they reached Detroit, Dawn drove him through one neighborhood after another. Gas stations. Old diners. Motels with flickering vacancy signs. Used-car lots. Side streets where the sidewalks buckled under tree roots and the summer heat shimmered above the asphalt.
They asked everyone who might have seen the car.
“Hi. Have you seen this vehicle?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
“Hi. Have you seen this woman?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
One day.
Two days.
Three days.
Nothing.
Every door closed in their faces. Every shake of a head sounded like a sigh.
Dawn watched Nathan from behind as he walked ahead of her. His back stayed straight. His steps never faltered. In front of strangers, he never showed exhaustion. He never complained. He never gave up.
But she saw it anyway.
The way his hand tightened inside his pocket. The way his jaw locked. The way something in his eyes dimmed every time another person said no.
Like a lamp in the wind, flickering between light and darkness.
At dusk, they stopped by the Detroit River.
The setting sun poured gold across the water. Light shattered over the ripples, scattered into a thousand bright pieces. Across the river, Windsor had begun to glow, one window after another lighting up in orange, white, and blue. The colors trembled on the water as if the city had been turned upside down and left there to drift.
It was beautiful.
Beautiful enough to hurt.
Dawn bought two burgers from a place nearby and carried them over in a paper bag. She took one out and handed it to Nathan.
He accepted it but did not eat.
The bag rustled in his hand whenever the river wind passed through.
He stood there, looking toward the lights on the other side, silent.
The wind lifted his hair. A few strands fell across his forehead, but he did not brush them away. Sunset edged his profile in gold. His features looked sharper in that light, carved and distant, his lashes casting a small shadow beneath his eyes.
Dawn stood beside him and took a bite of her burger.
The bun had gone a little cold. The patty was no longer crisp.
She chewed for a long time before swallowing.
“Have you been across?” Nathan suddenly asked.
Dawn glanced at him. “To Windsor? Yes. It’s quick if you take the Ambassador Bridge.”
“Oh.”
“Do you want to go look?”
Nathan shook his head.
“I’m not going.”
Dawn took another bite.
This one was even colder.
After a while, Nathan spoke again.
“But she wanted to.”
Dawn froze.
The burger stopped halfway to her mouth.
She turned to look at him.
But Nathan was not looking at her. His gaze remained on the lights across the water, and the tenderness in his eyes made her chest ache.
It was not the tenderness of someone admiring a view.
It was the tenderness of someone seeing a ghost no one else could see.
Suddenly, the burger in Dawn’s mouth lost all taste.
She lowered her head, wrapped the rest of it back into the paper, and put it into the bag. The paper crackled softly between her fingers, a small helpless sound in the wind.
That night, back at the hotel, Dawn lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling was white, with one thin crack running from the corner of the wall toward the light fixture. It looked like a dried riverbed. Or a wound that had never fully closed.
She did not turn on the lamp.
The room stayed dark except for the strip of streetlight slipping through the curtains, painting a small orange square across the ceiling.
She kept thinking about him by the river.
How deeply did a person have to love someone for every unfamiliar view to become a place they wished that person could have seen?
But she wanted to.
In Nathan’s world, Chloe had never left.
She lived in his heart. In every sentence he spoke. In every view his eyes touched. In every breath he took.
Dawn turned onto her side and buried her face in the pillow.
It was soft and smelled faintly of hotel detergent, sweet in a way that felt artificial.
She did not cry.
Her chest only felt tight.
Too tight to breathe.
As if something heavy had settled there and refused to move.