Chapter 12
+15 Bonus
Yvonne didn’t want to leave.
But in the end, she couldn’t change Lucas’s mind. Reluctantly, she accepted the compensation he offered and purchased a ticket to leave the country.
The day Celia’s autopsy report came in, Lucas scanned the document and froze when his eyes landed on the time of death.
Sixteen days ago?
But that didn’t make sense. He had seen Celia alive just a week ago.
Unable to reconcile this, he voiced his confusion to the medical examiner. The examiner paused for a moment, his expression
briefly puzzled, but then quickly reaffirmed, “Mr. Shaw, this report was prepared by the most experienced pathologist on our
team. There’s no chance of an error.”
Walking out of the police station, Lucas felt as though his footing had turned insubstantial, the ground beneath him slipping
away.
How could this be? How could someone who had supposedly been dead for sixteen days have lived alongside him for an entire
week?
He refused to believe it.
The memory of her body’s unusually rapid decomposition the day it was discovered sent a chill through him, and a chilling
thought began to take shape in his mind.
Was the body in the wardrobe not truly Celia? Or had she somehow died but remained in this world for reasons beyond his
comprehension?
The more he considered it, the more the puzzle pieces of recent events began to fit together.
Sixteen days ago, Celia had called him repeatedly, saying she had something urgent to discuss. Yet when he finally returned
home, she had been sitting calmly on the couch, as though nothing was wrong.
Then there was the strange countdown calendar with only seven pages, which disappeared the same day Celia stopped contacting
him.
And the most damning clue of all was when he had accidentally knocked her down that day, her skin had been unnaturally cold,
and he couldn’t find her pulse.
Every sign seemed to point to one answer: the latter was true
