Chapter 2

Blake Harrison stared at the scattered beads, his face a mask of cold fury. "You..."

Chloe simply looked at him, her eyes empty of the love and desperation that used to fill them. She pulled her wrist from his grasp and turned away, collecting the broken pieces of the holographic projector he had just smashed. A sense of release, vast and hollow, filled her.

She returned to their house, a place that had never felt like a home. It was a grand, beautiful mansion, but it was always cold, filled with a suffocating silence. She walked through the halls, her footsteps echoing in the emptiness.

In her room, she found the source of her past obsession, the thing Blake had just destroyed. It was a holographic projector, a custom-made device. For three years, whenever the loneliness became too much to bear, she would turn it on. It projected a life-sized image of Blake, programmed with his voice, reciting poetry or simply standing there, looking at her. She had used it for comfort, a pathetic substitute for the real man who despised her.

Flashbacks flooded her mind, unbidden and sharp. She saw herself as a young girl, wild and headstrong, her laughter echoing through the gardens of the Miller estate. She remembered the first time she saw Blake Harrison, so cool and distant, and the immediate, all-consuming infatuation that followed. She remembered throwing away her colorful dresses, learning boring etiquette, and trying to mold herself into the perfect, gentle wife she thought he wanted.

Then came the memory of the engagement party. Not hers, but his. He was supposed to marry Amelia. The heartbreak had been so intense she thought she would die from it. She remembered getting drunk, making a scene, and somehow, through a series of chaotic events, ending up as his bride instead. He had hated her for it from day one.

The projector had been her secret shame, a symbol of her desperate love. Now, its pieces lay in her hands, a testament to her foolishness.

Just as she was about to throw the broken parts into a trash bag, the door to her room burst open. Blake stood there, his face dark with rage.

"Still playing with your toys?" he sneered, his eyes falling on the projector parts in her hands. "Can't even be without me for a second, can you? You have to use a doll to satisfy your pathetic loneliness."

His words were meant to hurt, to humiliate her. And they did. But the pain was distant now, like an old injury that only ached when the weather was bad. His possessiveness was suffocating, his disdain a constant poison.

She didn't answer him. She simply placed the broken pieces of the projector into a small box, next to the shattered prayer beads she had picked up from the yacht. Two broken symbols of a broken love. Her heart felt nothing but an empty calm.