The Invisible Bridge: My Last Goodbye

CHAPTER 3: THE ANATOMY OF GASLIGHT

The morning light was a liar. It streamed into Belgiana’s small apartment, a bright, cheerful gold that felt like a mockery. It was sharp and unforgiving, exposing the dust motes dancing in the air, the faint scuff mark on the floor from where she’d dragged her suitcase, the empty wine glass from a lifetime ago, two nights past. It exposed everything, especially the hollow, screaming emptiness on her skin, just above the neckline of her worn cotton robe. The phantom limb of her legacy.

She had not slept. The night had been a long, silent, slow-motion reel on a broken projector: the cool night air on the balcony, the pressure of Justin’s hands—one on her waist, one tracing a treacherous path up her spine—the glint of the pendant as it vanished into the black void of his pocket, and Jessica’s face, a pale moon of triumph in the doorway, her smile not a curve of lips but the glint of a surgical blade.

The knock on the door, when it came, was firm. Rhythmic. Tap. Tap-tap. It was the sound of a debt collector arriving for a payment he knew was already owed.

She opened it.

Justin stood there, holding two paper cups of coffee like a peace offering. He looked like he’d aged a decade in a single night. Purple shadows pooled in the hollows beneath his eyes, a testament to a restlessness she now understood was guilt, not concern. But he had showered, shaved, and put on his armor—a crisp, cornflower-blue button-down shirt, the very picture of boyish sincerity. It was the uniform of a man who had made his choice and was now prepared to sell it.

“I brought you this,” he said, his voice a carefully calibrated instrument of neutrality. It was the tone one used to placate a skittish animal, or to begin the process of rewriting history. As if last night had been a minor lovers’ spat over a forgotten birthday or a careless word.

Belgiana didn’t take it. She just stared at him, her body a live wire of cold, sick fury, trembling with the effort of containing the scream building in her throat. “Where is it?”

He had the audacity to sculpt his face into a mask of gentle confusion. The performance was already underway. “Where is what, love?”

“The pendant, Justin.” The words were ground glass in her throat. “My mother’s pendant. The one you stole from my neck last night.” Her voice was a low, ragged thing, stripped of all its softness.

He stepped inside without an invitation, his presence an immediate violation of the sanctum her home had become. He closed the door behind him, a soft, final click, and set the coffees on her small, wooden table. He sighed, a masterful performance of weary, patient affection. “Belgiana, we’ve been over this. You lost it. At the gala. You were overwhelmed, it was loud and crowded… it probably caught on someone’s bracelet, or the clasp was weak. It broke. These things happen.” He spread his hands, a gesture of helpless reasonableness. “It’s tragic, but it’s just a thing.”

The world tilted on its axis. He wasn’t just denying it. He was meticulously, confidently, rewriting reality. He was erasing the violent theft and replacing it with a narrative of her own careless tragedy.

“You… you unclasped it,” she whispered, the memory so vivid, so physically real she could still feel the ghost of his fumbling fingers. Her voice broke. “You put it in your pocket. I saw you. I felt it.”

He gave a short, humorless laugh and ran a hand through his perfectly styled hair, a gesture of frustration she had once found endearing. Now it was a calculated piece of theater. “You saw? Belgiana, be reasonable. You’d had a few glasses of champagne. You were emotional, and it was a chaotic night. I was kissing you. My hands were on your back, trying to comfort you. I would never, ever do something like that.” He took a step closer, his eyes pleading with a sincerity that was the most terrifying lie of all. “You know me.”

You know me.

The three most devastating words a skilled liar can utter. They were not a reassurance; they were a weapon. They were designed to bypass logic and strike directly at the heart of her doubt, to make her question the irrefutable evidence of her own senses. He was forcing her to choose between the memory seared onto her retina and the history she thought they had built together.

Tears of pure, hot frustration welled in her eyes, blurring his treacherous face. “You’re lying. Jessica was there. She saw the whole thing! She saw you take it!”

His expression hardened then, the concerned boyfriend mask slipping for just a fraction of a second, revealing the cold strategist beneath. “Jessica saw me leading my distraught girlfriend away from a crowd after she’d realized she’d lost a priceless family heirloom. That’s what she saw. She was concerned for you.”

He stepped closer again, but the space between them was now an infinite, frozen chasm. “You need to let this go, Belgiana. This obsession… it’s not healthy. It was a necklace. A thing. I’m here. I’m real. What we have is real. Isn’t that more important?”

This was the masterstroke. The final twist of the knife. To reframe her grief, her righteous anger, her gut-wrenching sense of violation, as a psychological flaw—an “obsession.” To frame his monumental betrayal as her own failure to prioritize, her inability to see what truly mattered. Him.

She looked at him—at the handsome, familiar face she had traced with her fingers, at the lips that had whispered endearments and lies with the same tender curve—and saw a complete and utter stranger. A skilled, malevolent stranger who had been studying her, learning her vulnerabilities, not to cherish them, but to exploit them.

Her phone, charging on the kitchen counter, buzzed. A single, insistent vibration. Then it buzzed again, and again, relentless. She glanced over. The screen glowed with an unknown number. International. +32. Belgium.

A cold dread, colder than the ice of Justin’s lies, washed over her, draining the last of the warmth from her body. With a hand trembling so violently she could barely control it, she picked it up and swiped to answer, bringing it to her ear.

“Belgiana Rosales?” a man’s voice said. It was crisp, formal, devoid of any human warmth, each word clipped and precise as a legal document.

“Yes?” Her own voice was a ghost.

“This is Maître Thierry Dubois, counsel for the Laurent family estate. We are in receipt of your recent, and highly inappropriate, communications to Mr. Charles Laurent.” The words were bullets, each one finding its mark. “We are also in possession of notarized documentation, including a sworn affidavit from a senior executive of Laurent-Lee Holdings and clear photographic evidence, that proves conclusively the heirloom you referenced in your claim is, and has always been, the legal property of the Laurent family. It was reported missing from a family collection decades ago.”

Belgiana’s knees buckled. She gripped the countertop, her knuckles turning white. The affidavit. The photograph. Jessica. She had moved with impossible, brutal, pre-emptive speed. She hadn't just stolen the pendant; she had stolen its history, its provenance, its very soul.

“Any further attempts to contact Mr. Laurent or to assert this fraudulent claim,” Maître Dubois continued, his tone dripping with disdain, “will be met with immediate and severe legal action, both in the Philippines and in international courts. The cost to you, both financial and reputational, would be catastrophic. Do you understand the position you are in?”

The room swam, the cheerful morning light curdling into a nauseating swirl. The phone slipped from her nerveless fingers and clattered onto the ceramic tiles, the sound horribly final.

Justin looked at it, then back at her, his face a masterclass in feigned, bewildered concern. “Who was that, Bel? Is everything okay? You’re white as a sheet.”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She had been turned to stone, her back to him, staring out the window at a world that had suddenly, definitively, become a hostile and alien place. The foundations of her past and the potential of her future had been vaporized in a single, coordinated strike.

He misinterpreted her catatonic silence as surrender. He moved to put a hand on her shoulder, a gesture that now felt like the touch of a jailer. “Belgiana, whatever it is, it’s going to be—”

“Get out.”

The words were not loud. They were quiet, final, and carved from a new, harder substance he had never heard in her voice before. It was the sound of a door slamming shut forever.

He hesitated, his hand hovering in the air between them, a bridge to a country that no longer existed.

“Get out,” she repeated, her voice cracking like thin ice under the immense, unbearable weight of everything she was holding inside.

He left. The door clicked shut, a sound as soft and devastating as the snap of the necklace’s clasp.

Alone, Belgiana slid down the kitchen cabinet to the cold, hard floor. The sobs came then, great, heaving, silent waves that tore through her without sound, a seismic event of the soul. She had lost the pendant. She had lost Justin. She had lost her father. In the space of twelve hours, every bridge she had to the world, every path to love and belonging, had been meticulously set ablaze, and she was left watching the embers die in the unforgiving morning light.

But as she curled into a ball on the cold tiles, her tears salting the wound, a single, clear, and unassailable thought emerged from the wreckage—a shard of diamond in the mud.

He lied.

The evidence of her senses was true. His reality was the fabrication. It was a small, hard, and infinitely precious seed of truth.

And in the barren landscape of her life, it was the only thing she had left to build on.