Hunting My Runaway Wife Twice

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I was just starting to feel out the rhythm of this brand-new city.

Everything here carried a crisp, unfamiliar novelty, allowing me a temporary reprieve from the suffocating memories of my recent past.

When Victor Caldwell got into that car accident and lost his memory, he also completely wiped the slate clean of all the obsessive, forceful things he had done to me.

His family moved with ruthless efficiency. They had the divorce papers drawn up and finalized the very same day. Armed with a freshly minted divorce decree and a check bearing an astronomical sum of money, I was promptly "escorted" to this city by his people.

Freedom came so abruptly that it took me quite a while to adjust to a life where my every move wasn't being monitored.

Then, on a day just like any other, as I was walking back from the local farmer's market, a hand clamped down hard over my nose and mouth. The world faded to black.

When I opened my eyes again, the damp chill and the hauntingly familiar shadows of that basement sent a violent shudder down my spine.

A man's voice, low and icy, brushed against my ear. "As long as you behave, I can give you anything you want in this world."

...Perfect. Exactly like it was all those years ago.

By the time I found out Victor had lost his memory, a full week had passed since his car crash.

The surgeons had practically pulled him back from the brink of death. When his mother told me about it, she was a terrifying mixture of grief and pure rage. One eye weeping, the other glaring daggers at me. "If he hadn't gone out looking for you, my Victor wouldn't be lying in a hospital bed right now!"

According to her, Victor had been in the middle of a session with his therapist when he realized I had run away again. He immediately got into his car to chase me down. In a moment of frantic distraction, he swerved into the path of an oncoming semi-truck.

Thank god his car was a custom-built, armored monstrosity of a vehicle, giving the truck driver just enough time to jerk the wheel. Otherwise, Victor wouldn't just have lost his memory; he would have been completely wiped from the server and sent straight to his next life.

It hit me then.

Oh... so thats what happened.

No wonder he hadn't shown up to drag me back all week. I had honestly just assumed the GPS tracker he implanted in my things was broken.

It was his fault I spent an entire week getting wind-whipped on a private island for nothing.

I was the wife Victor Caldwell had acquired through sheer, unadulterated force.

Personally, I didn't think I possessed a single trait that warranted that level of obsession. I was a standard corporate drone, and he was my boss's bossthe man who owned the very skyline we worked in.

Thinking back on it, our only real intersection before the madness began was the night of the company gala, when I smashed a bottle of expensive Merlot over his cousins head for sexually harassing a junior female employee.

For about twenty-four hours, I was certain I was going to be blacklisted from the industry.

Instead, the next morning, I received a transfer notice. I was pulled from my crumbling, dead-end branch office and dropped straight into the Manhattan headquartersa position people would gladly sell their souls for.

My salary tripled overnight. Like a good little corporate workhorse, I put my head down and started plowing the fields.

Victor seemed to genuinely appreciate my work ethic. He always greeted me with a warm smile, gave me raises and promotions with alarming frequency, fired the middle managers who tried to make my life difficult, and even went out of his way to get rid of my relentless, clingy ex-boyfriend.

He validated my professional worth, while simultaneously acting as a safety net for any mistake I ever made. The cheap, twenty-dollar cufflinks I bought him for his birthday stayed pinned to his bespoke suits, day in and day out.

I thought I was just incredibly lucky. Every day when I left the office, I practically bowed to the heavens, thanking the universe for blessing me with such an incredible boss. I would have gladly worked for him for the rest of my life.

Then came the night I had a little too much to drink at a celebration dinner. In a hazy fog, Victor guided me into the back of his Bentley.

He pulled me against his shoulder, his voice a soft, low hum. "Go to sleep. I'll take you home."

I was a lightweight, and I had drank enough that night to easily pass out until morning. But, by some twist of fate, I woke up halfway through the drive.

I opened my eyes just in time to catch Victor Caldwell secretly, desperately kissing my lips.

The illusion shattered, and Victor didn't even bother trying to glue the pieces back together. He stopped pretending. He told me he wanted me.

A billionaire's pursuit is always blunt and overwhelming. Private jets, yachts, diamonds, haute couture, priceless antiquesif I could imagine it, Victor could buy it.

And beyond the money, the man himself was entirely unreasonable in his perfection. Chiseled jaw, broad shoulders, narrow waist. Dangerously charming when he smiled, devastatingly intense when he didn't. Whenever we walked down the street, people looked at me like I had pulled off the heist of the century.

But Ive always been a pragmatist. If I don't feel it, I don't feel it.

I thought, If this is some elaborate rich-man's game, I'm going to make sure he pays for it.

But it wasn't a game. It was a terrifying reality I didn't want to admit: beneath the mountains of cold, hard cash, he was offering me his actual, beating heart.

And playing with someones true heart is just asking for bad karma.

So, after I rejected his advances for the final time, Victor snapped.

He owned a sprawling waterfront estate, and deep within that estate was a soundproof, windowless panic room. He told me that if I ever tried to run, he would drag me into that room and take me apart. Afterward, with his face still flushed and breathless, he would force me to marry him.

"Be mine, and I'll give you the world," he would threaten, adding that if I refused, hed break my legs and keep me locked away forever.

Of course, he made these threats constantly, but he never actually followed through with the violence. Every time he caught me running away, hed drag me back, look at my utterly indifferent expression, and get so furiously worked up that his eyes would go red, teetering on the edge of tears.

Then, I would behave for a while.

Mostly because I thought he looked incredibly hot when he cried.

At first, this little cat-and-mouse game was novel. But after a while, even I got bored. I couldn't actually escape, and he couldn't bring himself to actually hurt me. Besides, the estate was massive. There were so many beautiful rooms left unexplored, and constantly having sex in a cramped panic room just wasn't practical.

So, on a bright, sunny Tuesday morning, I married him.

Most of the time, Victor was the dominant force in the room. Like any powerful man used to taking what he wanted, he wished he could tie me to his belt loop and monitor my existence down to the second.

But he was also crippled by a profound insecurity. He knew he had secured our marriage through underhanded coercion, so he never dared to actually lock me in a gilded cage. He lived in constant, agonizing fear of losing me. If I was out of his sight, he lost his mind.

Eventually, torn apart by his dual nature of insecurity and possessiveness, Victor couldn't help himself. While I was sleeping, he planted micro-trackers in my phone, my bags, and my jewelry.

If I stayed away from the house for more than twenty-four hours, it wouldn't take him sixty minutes to suddenly appear and drag me back home.

Once I figured out his system, I just started treating him like a premium Uber service. If I was out shopping and got tired, I'd just check into a nice hotel and go to sleep. Because I knew, without fail, I would wake up in my own silk pajamas, tucked into the massive bed at the estate.

It was as convenient as teleportation.

The only downside was that upon waking up, Id inevitably find fresh, blooming bruises along my collarbone where Victor had decided to help himself while I was out cold.

This time, however, I miscalculated.

I had only planned a little day trip to the private island off the coast of Martha's Vineyard that he bought for me. But three days passed, and my phone didn't so much as buzz.

I sat on the beach, the ocean breeze whipping my hair, thoroughly inspecting my phone to see if the tracker had short-circuited. I was literally contemplating if the GPS satellites had fallen out of the sky. It never even occurred to me that Victor was the one who had crashed.

It worked out beautifully, really. Now he had amnesia and had forgotten I even existed.

When people at the hospital informed him he had a wife, he just waved a hand, his face perfectly blank. "Divorce her. I don't remember the woman anyway."

With just a few casual strokes of fate's pen, everyone ended up exactly where they belonged.

Victor went back to being the untouchable, ice-cold billionaire CEO who had zero interest in romance.

His mother finally got the chance to set him up with some suitable heiress.

And me? I was free.

Oh, and I also walked away with eighty millionin US dollars.

Right before I left, Victor's mother gave me an explicit warning to never show my face in front of her son again.

"Victors obsession with you was nothing more than a psychological symptom. Now that hes practically cured, don't you dare delude yourself into thinking he'll ever look at you the way he used to."

I had heard whispers about Victor's mental statea sort of obsessive paranoia rooted in severe childhood trauma. It explained his fixation on me, I suppose. Makes sense. What kind of sane, well-adjusted man aggressively forces a woman into marriage against her will?

Those three years of marriage felt like a bizarre fever dream.

Now that I was awake, the waterfront estate, the yachts, the diamonds, the dark little panic room... they were all gone.

All I had left was the feather-light weight of eighty million dollars in my bank account.

His mother told me to get as far away as humanly possible, and I was a woman of my word. I pulled up a map, found the city that was furthest away from Victor Caldwell's New York headquarters, booked the next flight out, and left without looking back.

I settled down in Portland, Oregon. I bought a moderately sized house, picked up some simple furniture, and got a part-time job at a quiet, cozy artisanal bakery just to pass the time.

It felt exactly like my life before Victor Caldwell had ever stepped into it.

The owner, Betty, had a grandson named Hudson. He was a senior in college and helped out at the shop on his weekends. He was obsessed with financial news and business gossip, keeping the small TV in the corner of the caf permanently tuned to Bloomberg or CNBC.

The first time I saw Victor again was on that screen.

He was being discharged from the hospital. The paparazzi were clamoring to get a shot of his still slightly pale face, but he didn't spare them a single glance. He was distant, aloof, completely unapproachable.

A reporter shouted a question about rumors of a secret marriage, shoving a blurry, poorly-lit photo of me into his face. "Mr. Caldwell, is it true this woman is your wife?"

Victor glanced at it, his expression devoid of any emotion. "I'm sorry, but I have absolutely no memory of her."

Watching this, Hudson leaned against the counter and sighed. "Professor Caldwell has to be in his thirties by now, right? I can't believe he's not married."

"Professor?" I asked.

"Yeah, he used to be a guest lecturer at my business school. You have no idea how many people were obsessed with him."

"Why?" I asked, lazily propping my chin on my hand. "Because he didn't take attendance?"

"Because he's gorgeous, obviously!"

Hudson went on to explain how men like Victor Caldwell were revered on college campuses. Sophisticated, mature, impeccably polite but entirely unreachable. He talked my ear off, recounting legends of how coldly Victor had rejected both female and male students who tried to shoot their shot.

Hudson's glowing, reverent descriptions slowly merged with the icy, composed man on the television screen.

I suddenly remembered what Victor's mother had screamed at me the day we got married. "This is all your fault! My Victor was never like this before he met you!"

At the time, I thought she was just being completely unreasonable. How was I supposed to know what Victor was like before me? From the moment he set his sights on me, he had been a ruthless, unhinged bastard willing to do whatever it took to keep me. The kind of man who, if I slapped him across the face, would probably just kiss my palm.

Now, a profound realization washed over me.

Oh. So this is who Victor Caldwell really is.

Psychological trauma really is a terrifying thing. It took an untouchable man on a pedestal and completely warped his personality, turning him into someone who would cry for me, lose his mind over me, and stoop to the most despicable lows just to trap me.

Thank god he lost his memory.

The news cycle surrounding Victor was relentless over the next few days.

Losing three years of his memory didn't seem to impact his genius one bit. One day he was acquiring a massive tech firm, the next he was closing a merger. His empire was expanding faster than ever.

In interviews, he was perfectly normal. When a host asked if he had any plans to marry soon, he stated plainly that he didn't hold much expectation for romantic love, and would likely enter into a strategic marriage of convenience when the time came.

"But what if you meet the girl of your dreams?" the host pressed.

He offered a faint, polite smile. "Even if I did, I doubt I would do anything about it. I highly respect boundaries and the autonomy of others."

I sat in front of the TV in total silence.

Right person, wrong time, I guess.

Hudson walked out of the back kitchen holding a massive bowl of the bakerys most expensive signature dessert, loaded with extra toppings.

"Wow, big spender today," I teased.

He beamed. "Of course. Celebrating my new job offer."

"Congratulations. Which firm?"

"Caldwell Enterprises."

I choked on my pastry, coughing violently into a napkin.

"Wait... isn't Caldwell HQ in New York?"

"They're opening a new branch. Haven't you been watching?"

He rewound the interview by thirty minutes. Sure enough, there was Victor Caldwell, speaking eloquently about corporate expansion. And the very first stop on his new national map? Portland, Oregon.

Remembering my own soul-crushing days as a corporate drone in a branch office, I offered a word of warning. "Working at HQ is great, but branch offices will work you to the bone."

"But the pay is incredible."

"You're young. Why are you in such a rush to make money?"

Hudson cast a fleeting, nervous glance my way, then quickly looked away, the tips of his ears turning pink. "I guess... I just want to feel more confident when I ask out the person I like."

I don't think it was just my imagination. Hudson had a crush on me.

Twenty-something boys are too easy to read. The flushed cheeks when we made eye contact, the nervous fiddling with his sleeves, the random bursts of hyperactive energyhe wore his heart on his sleeve.

Unsurprisingly, he confessed his feelings to me.

Equally unsurprisingly, I rejected him with swift, clean finality.

Unlike Victorwho, upon being rejected, would show up the next day pretending nothing happened and shamelessly declare, "Persistence is a virtue"Hudson had thin skin. The moment the words left my mouth, his eyes welled up. He mumbled a choked "I'm sorry to bother you," and bolted out the door.

By 11:00 PM, he still wasn't back. Betty was pacing the floor of the apartment upstairs, sick with worry.

I was just about to call him when my phone buzzed with a text from his number.

[June, I'm at the police station. Can you come bail me out?]

To my surprise, Hudson hadn't gone on some destructive, heartbroken rampage.

Instead, he had actually gone to a networking dinner for his new job. After a few drinks, a wealthy client suggested they "go have some real fun." Hudson, slightly buzzed and naive, just followed along.

It wasn't until they were in a private VIP room at a club and someone tried to unbuckle his belt that he snapped out of it.

"I didn't know the client was into guys, and the club he took me to was... well, I panicked. So I called the cops."

The result was that he ended up getting himself thrown in a holding cell alongside the client.

"The client told me hes going to ruin my career," Hudson said, looking like he was about to cry again. "My boss is on his way here right now..."

"Your boss?" A sudden, cold dread pooled in my stomach. "Which boss, exactly?"

"It's..."

Before he could finish, Hudson stood up abruptly, his teary eyes fixed on something over my shoulder.

"Mr. Caldwell. You're here."