Chapter 305: Distant
Abby had always prided herself on being able to read people, especially Remo. It was one of the reasons she’d felt safe with him, why she had fallen for him so deeply. But lately, something was off. She could sense it in the way his eyes lingered on her when he thought she wasn’t looking, the way his touch, though still gentle, held a hesitation that hadn’t been there before. It was subtle—so subtle that it would have been easy to dismiss it as stress, as something external, if she didn’t know him so well.
But she did. And it terrified her.
In the days since she first noticed the shift, Abby had tried to convince herself that she was imagining things, that Remo was just preoccupied with business or something else that had nothing to do with her. But the more she tried to push those thoughts away, the more they festered, growing into an all-consuming anxiety that gnawed at her from the inside out.
She found herself watching him constantly, scrutinizing every word, every gesture, searching for some sign that he wasn’t slipping away from her. But the harder she looked, the more convinced she became that he was. The distance between them felt like it was growing by the day, and no matter what she did—how close she stayed to him, how much she tried to make things normal, to recreate the happiness they’d shared—it wasn’t enough.
He was pulling away, and she didn’t know why.
That evening, as she sat in the living room, waiting for Remo to come home, Abby felt her anxiety coil tightly in her chest, a serpent ready to strike. She had spent the entire day trying to distract herself, reading , cleaning, doing anything she could think of to keep her mind from spiraling, but nothing had worked. Every time she thought of Remo, of the way he had been acting, the fear grew stronger, more insistent.
What if he had found out about her past? What if he knew about the facility, about the things she had done, the things she had tried so hard to bury? She had just told him a little bit of what she had done. If he finds out the kind of monster she was—The thought made her stomach turn, bile rising in her throat. She couldn’t lose him. She couldn’t go back to being alone, to that darkness.
She heard the sound of the front door opening and her heart leapt into her throat. Remo was home. Abby stood up quickly, smoothing down her dress, trying to calm the frantic beating of her heart. She needed to act normal, needed to keep it together. But as soon as she saw him, standing in the doorway, looking so handsome and strong, her resolve crumbled.
"Remo," she breathed, forcing a smile onto her face as she crossed the room to him. "You’re home."
He smiled back at her, but it didn’t reach his eyes. "Yeah, I’m home."
She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him close, needing to feel the solidity of his body, to remind herself that he was still here, still hers. "I missed you today," she whispered, pressing her cheek against his chest.