Chapter 2

Chef Antoine Dubois's safe house was a small, dusty apartment above his old, shuttered bistro in a forgotten part of the city. It smelled of dried herbs and memories. He didn't ask questions. He just gave me a bed, a bowl of his rich onion soup, and the key. "Rest," he said. "The world can wait."

But I couldn't rest. My mind was a hornet's nest of anger and betrayal. The first thing I did was buy a burner phone and a cheap laptop. I had set up a cloud-based security system for Aura, a system Sarah didn't know I could access remotely. My heart hammered against my ribs as I typed in the password. Please work.

It worked.

Dozens of video files appeared on the screen. I clicked on the one from the night of the inspection. I fast-forwarded through hours of footage of an empty kitchen, then stopped. A figure in a dark hoodie slipped in through the back door. The man pulled down his hood.

Mark Davies.

I watched, my breath held, as he walked calmly to the walk-in, pulled a package from his jacket, and placed it in the back of the cooler. He was in and out in less than a minute. The proof. Cold, hard proof.

My hands were shaking, but I kept clicking. I opened a file from a week earlier. The timestamp was 2 a.m. The kitchen was dark, but the infrared camera painted the scene in an eerie grey. Sarah. And Mark.

I watched as he backed her against the prep table, the same table where I had taught her how to properly filet a fish. He kissed her, and she kissed him back, her hands tangled in his hair. They were celebrating. Laughing. My stomach churned.

"His new truffle sauce is a joke," Mark said, his voice tinny through the laptop's speakers. He opened the cooler and pulled out a container of my signature demi-glace, the one that took me three days to make. He dipped his finger in it. "Good, but old-fashioned. I can make it better. More... commercial."

"Everything he does is old-fashioned," Sarah agreed, her voice dripping with scorn. "He has no vision, no ambition. He'd still be peeling potatoes in your kitchen if I hadn't pushed him."

The words were a physical blow. I thought back to the endless 20-hour days, the weekends spent washing dishes at other restaurants for extra cash. I remembered selling my grandfather's vintage car to pay for the custom-made ovens, a decision that had broken my heart. I remembered Sarah complaining about money, about how tired she was, all while she was planning this.

A specific memory surfaced, sharp and painful. A year ago, during a critical catering event, our main supplier for a rare mushroom had failed. Panicked, I had made a call to a guy I knew, a forager who operated in a grey market. He was reliable, his product was supreme, but he wasn't certified. It was a risk, but it saved the night. Sarah was the only one who knew. I had told her, "In this business, sometimes you have to break a small rule to keep a big promise."

She had used that against me. She had seen my pragmatism not as a strength, but as a weakness she could exploit. My own integrity, twisted into a weapon to destroy me.

I felt a wave of nausea so intense I had to run to the small, grimy bathroom and heave into the toilet. There was nothing in my stomach but bile. I splashed cold water on my face, staring at the stranger in the mirror. His eyes were hollow, his face pale and gaunt.

I went back to the laptop and saw a new video file had just been uploaded. It was a local news segment. Sarah, dressed in black, her face a mask of practiced grief, was giving an interview on the steps of our apartment building.

"I just can't believe it," she said, dabbing a tear from her eye with a tissue. "Ethan put his entire soul into that restaurant. He was a brilliant, passionate man. This... this destroyed him. I just hope he's okay, wherever he is."

The hypocrisy was a suffocating gas. I saw the comments scrolling below the video: "Poor woman, my heart goes out to her." "That chef is a monster for putting her through this." "What a brave, supportive partner."

The sight of her face, the sound of her lies, it made my skin crawl. It was a physical revulsion, a deep, cellular rejection of everything she was.

I opened the photo gallery on my burner phone, which I had synced to my old cloud account. A picture of us in Paris, smiling under the Eiffel Tower. A selfie from our first anniversary, her head on my chest. I stared at the face of the woman I loved, the woman who had shared my bed, my dreams, and my life. She was a stranger. A monster.

With a steady hand, I selected all the photos. Every last memory.

And I hit delete.

The love I felt for her, the great, towering monument of my life, had been razed to the ground. On its ruins, something else was beginning to grow. Something cold, hard, and patient.