Page 126 of Modern Romance June 2025 1-4

I didn’t have anything to do with it, which meant he had. He must have.

I had to sit with that.

I didn’t only sit with it. Ifeltit. And I didn’t like feelings, so I decided the best thing to do was to eat mine.

I dedicated myself to finding the perfect treats. But what I thought about was him.

The calls kept coming as time went on. Tess and I talked very seriously about hiring another investigator, and began taking interviews to find someone who fit. I should have been jubilant that this dream of mine was going so well that it was hitting new milestones… But I wasn’t.

It was like I couldn’t feel anything unless it was a sugar rush. I became fixated on toast. I had my job to perform and this lovely little life that I built, and sugar and toast could not keep things running the way they should. I had to throw myself into my role the way I’d always done, and I did, but that meant that it was only at home that I could face the things that were really bothering me.

Like, say, the fact that I had sex for the first time in my life with a man who didn’t exist.

And who had abandoned me without a backward look the morning after anyway.

More time passes than I like to admit to myself before I shake that off.

Well. I don’tshake it off,exactly. But I stop spending my time aimlessly doomscrolling on social media. I stop staring at the ceiling in my apartment when I should be sleeping. I become deeply revolted with toast and crave burritos from a particular restaurant across the city from my apartment, and make sure I get at least one a day. Usually more.

Plus there’s a chocolate peanut butter truffle situation. Don’t ask. They taste like love should feel.

It’s going on four months by the time I stop moping and do the only thing I know how to do.

Solve the damn mystery. Or try.

I have the name he left behind, and part of it is the name he gave me. This makes me think that it might actually be a real lead so I throw everything I have into figuring out who this woman is. Or was.

In between my other jobs, I dig. Late at night in my apartment, I hunt through records and trace faint hints.

I build a picture—well, not a picture. A sketch at best.

Amara Mariana Vizcaya existed. She was real.

It’s amazing how relieved I am when I discover that. Like it makes up for the whole man I slept with who…maybe isn’t real at all no matter what he calls herself. She was a servant, originally from Basque Country, who left a great house in Spain some three decades ago. She entered the United States on a tourist visa in New York City, and like many, promptly disappeared.

I can find nothing in any US papers to tell me why she should be of interest to anyone. Much less of such interest that a man likehimhad gone to the trouble of assuming a fictional identity just to find her.

Assuming that’s what he was doing.

I’m thinking about this one morning while sitting in my little cave of an office, wishing I hadn’t let Tess talk me into breakfast sandwiches—that beloved New Jersey staple, a Taylor ham, egg, and cheese on a Kaiser roll—shortly after we arrived at work. It isn’t sitting well with me, but then, I’m convinced that might simply be more of the same temper that’s been gripping me since I flew back from France, because I’m fairly certain I’ve had indigestion ever since.

Four and a half months and counting.

I rub my belly—which, I can admit, is a lot thicker after months of eating my feelings around the clock—and glare at the screen in front of me. The truth is, I don’t actually know what he was doing here. He told me he was looking for this woman, and something in me really wants to believe that’s true, but I don’t know that it is. Or even if that was what he was doing. Or what reasons he had for doinganything.

Including all the things he did that night—

“You really have to stop thinking about that,” I mutter to myself.

I never wanted to hurt you,I hear him say again and again in my head.

I researched that law firm in Nice and identified the people who worked there months back. Several attorneys and a fair number of support staff, I believe. I remember that now and check the clock, pleased to see it’s only four o’clock in the afternoon over in France.

I look at the remains of my breakfast and feel gross. I feel thick and strange, the way I have for months now. I decide only answers will save me, so I call one of the lower-level assistants and lay a breathless sob story all over her. Complete with vocal fry.

“I know this is outrageous,” I say in the kind of broad American accent that makes every French person I have ever met roll their eyes, especially after no attempt at all at French, “but my boss gave me a list of tasks and I thought I wrote them down exactly as they needed to be done. Except there’s this one name on the list and I don’t knowwhy.”

The woman on the other end of the phone laughs. “We have all had these days,” she says, in perfect English. The rebuke is implied, but also feels automatic, not personal. This is what I was hoping might happen. “What was the name? Perhaps I can help.”

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