Sylvan Cheney watched Jasmine Yale leave the mall before making several phone calls.
It didn’t take long for Sylvan to confirm that Ann Nolan’s flight had arrived in Landon at three o’clock in the middle of the night yesterday.
Three o’clock last night—it had been nearly ten hours since then.
Sylvan’s brow furrowed as he instructed his subordinates to investigate the Santos Mansion.
The reply he received was that Ann hadn’t returned to the Santos Mansion, nor was there any record of Ann checking into the major hotels.
A woman alone in Landon for ten hours, especially deep into the night—where could she have gone?
At this mont, sunlight spilled outside, its radiant brilliance falling on the glass windows, refracting into prismatic colors.
Sylvan closed his eyes slightly, and a place suddenly flashed through his mind.
He called Zachary Santos back: "I had soone investigate. Ann indeed returned to Landon."
"Did you find her?"
"Not yet. I’m still looking," Sylvan said calmly. "Does she know about your brother?"
"I’m not too sure. I’ve been keeping it from her all this ti. But a few days ago, when I got back to my residence in Old York, I was so exhausted that I left the docunts face-down on the desk. Ann happened to visit to bring so pork rib soup. I’m not certain if she saw them or not."
"It seems she did. She likely knows about Zaiden Santos now."
"It’s my carelessness," Zachary Santos sighed, sounding both annoyed and guilty.
Even though, when he woke up, the docunts were still untouched, it didn’t an Ann hadn’t seen them.
Among those papers was Zaiden Santos’s death certificate.
"Understood," Sylvan replied, a sense of realization dawning upon him.
Sunlight fell straight down—it was precisely noon.
The sky was a deep azure, water flowing quietly below.
The branches swayed gently in the chilly wind, and emptiness seed to carry an inexplicable lancholy.
The breeze knocked droplets of dew lingering on the twigs to the ground, where they disappeared into the soil.
North Suburb Cetery.
Desolation stretched everywhere. Looking up, one saw an empty sky; looking down, an endless expanse of withered grass.
The horizon was nothing but a boundless bleakness.
Deep in the woods, a crow flew by now and then—its cries adding a sharper note to the wasteland’s eerie atmosphere.
Ann Nolan stood motionless in front of the gravestone, dressed in a long black coat. She had maintained this posture all through the night.
Her face was alarmingly haggard, dark circles under her eyes betraying many sleepless nights.
Her gaze stayed locked onto the photo on the gravestone—a man in his youth, frozen forever in that pri mont of life.
A black scarf was wrapped around her neck, but even so, the wind carried an inescapable chill.
Perhaps due to how long she had been standing, frost had dampened her fringe, leaving a thin layer plastered against her forehead.
Yet Ann’s eyes never strayed from the photo on the gravestone, her gaze unfathomably dark, her face pale.
This man... he had once been her husband.
They had shared a bed, shared a life, though their mories together seed to brim more with argunts and fights.
He didn’t love her—she had known that.
Their marriage, forced from the start, had been hastily pieced together. From their secretive union to the inevitable divorce, it had been as fleeting as a morning glory’s bloom.
In fact, in Landon, scarcely anyone knew that Zaiden Santos had ever been married.
Sunlight spilled onto Ann’s face, her long lashes trembling slightly, as if shrouded in a delicate mist.
The wind gently tousled Ann’s long hair, lifting soft strands that floated montarily. She stood still, like a statue.
Through an entire night and the morning that followed, she seed to have lost all sensation.
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