Five years later.
Eric Vance had never been a man of vices.
His mother raised him on discipline, his father on legacy, and between the two of them they'd produced a son who didn't drink, didn't smoke, and didn't waste time on anything that couldn't be quantified on a balance sheet.
That was before.
Now Eric sat behind his desk at Vance Corporation headquarters with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other, and if his twenty-year-old self could see him, that kid would've had questions.
The cigarette was his third today. The bourbon was not.
The office was enormous—floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, dark wood, leather furniture that cost more than most people's cars. A kingdom built for a king who looked, at this particular moment, like a man who hadn't slept properly since the last presidential administration.
A knock at the door. Eric didn't look up.
"Come in, Brandon."
Brandon Cole stepped inside with the careful posture of a man delivering bad news to someone holding a glass of alcohol at two in the afternoon.
He'd been Eric's assistant for seven years now, which meant he'd witnessed both eras—the before and the catastrophic after.
"So?" Eric said, ash falling from his cigarette onto a document he no longer cared about.
Brandon closed the door behind him. Adjusted his glasses. These were stalling tactics, and Eric recognized every single one.
"We checked the woman from the Hargrove fundraiser. Her name is Diana Kessler, she's a real estate developer from Portland, and she has a very active Instagram account that confirms she's been in Oregon for the past decade."
He paused. "It's not Estelle."
Eric's jaw tightened. He took a long drag of the cigarette and let the smoke curl toward the ceiling. "Run it again."
"Eric…"
"I said run it again.I saw her, Brandon. At the Whitmore investment summit three weeks ago—east side of the ballroom, near the bar. Chestnut hair, same height." His voice hardened. "That was Estelle."
Brandon didn't sit down. Standing was safer when Eric got like this—closer to the exit.
"I understand that you believe you saw her," he began carefully. "But this is the fourth time in six months we've run a full check on someone you spotted at an event, and every time it's turned out to be a different woman."
He hesitated, choosing his next words the way a surgeon chooses where to cut. "Eric, it's very common for people who've lost someone to see them in strangers. The mind fills in what it wants to see, especially in crowded…"
"Don't." Eric's voice dropped to something low and dangerous. The cigarette froze halfway to his lips. "Don't you dare finish that sentence the way I think you're about to finish it."
"I'm just saying…"
"You're speaking about my wife as if she's dead." Eric set the bourbon down with enough force to make the desk shudder. "She is not dead. She left—there's a difference."
Brandon exhaled. He'd had this conversation before—different versions, same core. The script never changed because Eric never changed his mind.
"I'm not saying it as your employee right now, I'm saying it as your friend. Five years, Eric."
Brandon said quietly, stepping closer despite every instinct telling him not to.
"Five years and nobody's seen her. No financial trail, no social media, no medical records, no tax filings under her name. Her family hasn't heard from her. Her college friends haven't heard from her. Nobody in any city we've checked has heard from her."
He let that settle before continuing. "At what point do we have to consider that the reason no one's found her is because—"
"Because she doesn't want to be found," Eric cut in flatly. "That's the reason. She's smart, was always smarter than I gave her credit for, and she planned this. She wanted to disappear, and she did it well."
"Or," Brandon said, as gently as a man could say something terrible, "she can't be found. And that's a possibility we can't keep ignoring just because it's the one you can't live with."
The silence in the office was absolute.
Eric stared at Brandon for a long moment—long enough that a lesser man would've flinched and left. Then he stubbed the cigarette out in a crystal ashtray that had once been purely decorative and said, very calmly,
"Continue the search. Expand the radius. Try the West Coast again."
"Eric."
"That's an order, Brandon. And after you've placed the calls, I'd like you to leave me alone."
Brandon sighed—the deep, resigned sigh of a man who knew the limits of his influence and had just hit them face-first. He nodded once, turned, and walked to the door.
"Brandon."
He stopped.
"I appreciate the concern," Eric said, without looking up. "I do. But she's alive. And I'm going to find her."
Brandon said nothing. He opened the door, stepped through it, and closed it softly behind him, leaving Eric alone with his bourbon and his certainty and the growing suspicion that one of them was empty.
Eric drained the glass.
The past five years had been obscenely profitable. Vance Corporation expanded into three new markets—renewable energy, biotech, and a defense contracting subsidiary that his father had been lobbying for since before Eric could vote.
Revenue doubled. Industry magazines called him "visionary." His competitors called him worse.
His mother, Clarice, was proud for the first time in her life, which Eric found deeply unsettling because Clarice's pride functioned less like maternal approval and more like a predator admiring its reflection.
His father, Henry, talked about legacy. About the Vance name enduring for generations. About Eric taking the company to heights that would make their family untouchable.
Eric felt none of it.
The house was the same one he'd shared with Estelle. He hadn't moved. Hadn't changed the furniture, hadn't redecorated, hadn't touched her side of the closet.
The kitchen table where she'd left the divorce papers was the same kitchen table where he ate breakfast every morning—alone, staring at the spot where a wedding ring had once sat like a period at the end of everything.
The divorce papers were in his desk drawer, right here, bottom left. Unsigned. He'd never signed them, which meant legally they were still married.
Legally, Estelle Vance was still his wife, wherever she was, alive or otherwise. He held onto that technicality the way a drowning man holds onto anything that floats.
Eric opened the desk drawer. Looked at the papers. Closed the drawer.
He reached for the bourbon bottle instead and poured another glass while his mind drifted to the other thing keeping him up at night—the professional problem, the one that didn't make his chest feel like it was caving in.
About a year ago, an anonymous entrepreneur had appeared on the market like a shark surfacing in a swimming pool. No name, no face, no public appearances.
Just results—brutal, surgical, devastating results. This person dismantled competitors with the kind of precision that suggested either genius or genuine sociopathy, possibly both.
Startups that had taken years to build were gutted in quarters. Established firms found their clients poached, their contracts undercut, their market share evaporating overnight.
Nobody knew who was behind it. No photographs existed. No interviews. Industry insiders had theories—a rogue hedge fund manager, a Silicon Valley exile, a foreign investor with a grudge. Eric was convinced it was a man.
The aggression, the calculated brutality of the takedowns, the absolute lack of sentimentality—it all felt masculine. Competitive in the way men compete when they're trying to prove something to someone who isn't watching.
Whoever he was, he was gunning for the top. And the top, currently, was Eric Vance.