You Had Me, You Lost Me, You'll Never Find Me novel Chapter 58

His second-to-last post read:

[I met someone today who looks exactly like you. But it's a pity... she isn't you.]

The final post was from the exact night Ashton hadn't come home to Sylvia. He had written:

[My girl.]

Every missing piece suddenly snapped together like a devastating puzzle.

No wonder Ashton despised sweets. No wonder he hated rainy days. No wonder he always looked so agonizingly lonely whenever he smoked. No wonder he had looked at her with such raw, unfiltered shock the very first time their eyes met.

No wonder he always found an excuse to disappear every year on March 16th.

No wonder Ashton could claim to love her, yet switch to being incredibly distant at the drop of a hat.

It wasn't that he was incapable of warmth; it was that he didn't want to give it. He had already loved someone else down to his bones.

He had burned all of his fiery devotion on another woman long ago.

Sylvia covered her eyes, but the tears fell relentlessly, hot and uncontrollable.

Then what was she? What the hell was she to him?

The girl's profile picture was a daisy, perfectly pairing with the silhouette icon Ashton still used on his messaging app.

Rebecca and Ashton's past was an entire universe she had been completely locked out of for three years.

She truly, deeply, had never imagined she was merely a body double for a dead woman.

It was all because she had loved him too much in the past. Love had made her blind and stupid.

But it still burned with an unbearable bitterness.

It was the agonizing unfairness of loving someone with everything she had, only to realize he had been looking right through her, searching for the ghost of another woman.

Countless times, Sylvia wanted to call him and scream at him, demanding the truth. Her fingers hovered over the keypad over and over again, but she never made the call.