Chapter 307: Our baby disappeared three months ago
Leo walked in wearing his prison uniform as though it were just another outfit. His hands rested casually in his pockets before he dropped into the chair across from her. No chains. No shame. No regret.
He leaned back comfortably and offered the same lazy smile that had once fooled her.
"Yvette." She stared at him. "You look terrible." There wasn’t a hint of concern in his voice. Only observation.
"You’ve lost weight." She ignored the comment. "Our daughter is missing."
The smile faded, not because he cared, but because she hadn’t bothered with greetings. "Our baby disappeared three months ago."
Leo blinked once. Nothing else. No shock. No panic. No questions. She swallowed hard and continued.
"I’ve searched everywhere. The police have nothing. I’ve talked to people I never thought I’d have to beg." Her voice trembled despite her efforts. "If you know anything... anyone... any name..."
She leaned forward. "Please, Leo." Silence stretched between them. He watched her with mild curiosity, almost as if she were telling him about someone else’s tragedy.
"You finished?" he finally asked. Yvette frowned.
"...What?"
"You done?" Her stomach tightened. "I came here because I thought,"
"That I’d help?" He laughed. Actually laughed. It echoed harshly against the concrete walls. Yvette felt her heartbeat stumble.
"I don’t know why you’d think that." She blinked.
"Leo..."
"I never cared about those babies."
The words landed so softly they almost missed her. Almost.
"What?"
"I said..." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "...I never cared about them."
Her lips parted. "They’re your children."
"So?"
"So?" Her voice cracked. "They’re your daughters!"
"They’re yours." Yvette stared at him as if she’d forgotten how to breathe. He shrugged. "You were the one obsessed with playing house."
Tears gathered in her eyes, but she forced them back. "I thought..."
"I know what you thought." His smile returned, thinner this time. "You thought I loved you." His chuckle was almost pitying.
"Yvette, you made yourself very easy to have." She froze. "You were fun." He waved a careless hand. "A distraction."
Then he used a word that sliced through her with all the precision of a knife. A word so degrading... She refused to let herself remember it afterward.
"You know the funny part?" he continued. "Everyone else knew exactly what this was." His eyes locked onto hers.
"You were the only one who didn’t." Her fingers curled into fists beneath the table. "You kept performing."
"What?"
"The sweet girl. The devoted girlfriend. The woman willing to do anything for love." He laughed again.
"You were so desperate for attention that you never stopped to ask what kind of attention you were getting." Each sentence stripped away another illusion she hadn’t realized she was still carrying. She had hated him. She had cursed him. She had blamed him.
But somewhere, buried beneath all that anger... A tiny, foolish part of her had still believed there had once been something real. Something worth mourning. He killed that belief with every word.
Finally... He stopped talking. The room fell silent. Yvette didn’t answer immediately. She simply looked at him. Really looked at him. Not through the eyes of the naïve woman who had mistaken manipulation for affection.
Not through the eyes of the desperate mother searching for hope.
But through eyes hollowed out by two months of sleepless nights, endless crying, and the unbearable ache of not knowing where her daughter was.
For the first time... She saw him exactly as he was. Not charming. Not complicated. Not misunderstood. Just small. Cruel. Empty.
Something inside her shifted. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t peace. It felt more like the moment a raging fever finally breaks. Your body still aches. You’re still weak. Nothing is healed.
But the fire consuming you is finally gone. Leo was no longer someone she needed answers from. No longer someone whose approval, affection, or remorse mattered. He was simply...
Nothing. Yvette sat very still. She let him finish.
Then she looked at him across the table, really looked at him, in the flat, clarifying way that two months of grief and sleeplessness had given her, and she felt something settle in her.
"I think," she said quietly, "that you deserve everything that is happening to you right now."
Leo said nothing.
"You will rot in here." Her voice was even. Almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if it had been vicious.
"And the family you had, your children, they will grow up and they will never know your name. Not really. Not the way it counts." She pushed her chair back and stood.
"You will just be someone who was supposed to matter and didn’t. And your name will be forgotten completely." She picked up her bag. "You pathetic, lonely man."
She walked out. She did not look back. She did not need to.
Leo sat at the table after she left.
The guard came to collect him, and he stood and walked back down the corridor, and the day continued the way days in prison continue slowly, identically, without the small negotiations and distractions of ordinary life to fill the hours.
He had a lot of time to think here.
That was the thing no one warned you about adequately. Not the loss of freedom, not the food, not the company. The thinking. The way the hours opened up and offered you nothing to put in them except yourself, and you had to sit with that, and what you found when you sat with it was not always what you expected.
He thought about a great many things in those hours.
But the thought that returned most persistently was the one that arrived uninvited and stayed longer than the rest, the one that was there when he woke up and there still when the lights went out, was not about the money, or the plan, or the things that had gone wrong.
It was about Amira.
Which made no sense to him and yet kept making itself true regardless. He turned it over the way you turn over something you have found in an unexpected place, trying to determine if it is valuable or simply strange.
Between all of it, the performance, the calculation, the careful construction of something that was never supposed to be real somewhere in there, without his permission and certainly without his intention, something had shifted.
He did not know what to do with that. He was not sure there was anything to do with it.
But it was there, in the quiet of the cell, in the long hours that belonged only to him and his own conscience, and it had his wife’s name on it, and it was not going anywhere.
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