Contract of Hearts

Boundaries

She did not take much while leaving just a duffel bag containing basic essentials things like some clothes and her especially her sketchbook. The contract still had some months left to it , but she couldn’t survive in that silence, she couldn't bear that distance not after such previous closeness.

She even gave him the courtesy of leaving him a signed note. Which was more than he had ever done for her.

“I can’t pretend anymore. It read

"Don’t come looking" for me .

Emma.

She Slipped the note inside the pillow case in his room , straightened her shoulders, dried her tears and prepared to leave.

She slipped out while the city slept, tears streaking her cheeks, running down her face her heart breaking in the quietest way possible.

Lawrence came home that evening expecting the usual routine. What he found instead was silence.

Eva’s room was empty.

There were no clothes, no paintings. Her intoxicating scent wasn't traceable.

Just absence.

At first, he told himself she’d stepped out. But as the hours passed, a terrible truth settled in his chest, she was gone.

He tore through the apartment looking for a note, a message, anything. There was nothing. The last thing she’d said to him was about his inability to feel.

And he’d proven her right.

But it hurt. More than it should have.

Because somewhere along the way, Eva had stopped being part of the contract. She had become his.

And now she’d vanished.

When Lawrence realized Eva was gone, he didn’t panic not at first.

She was impulsive, artistic. Maybe she needed space.

But when the second day passed, and her phone went straight to voicemail, his confidence cracked. By the third day, he had his legal team confirm she’d accessed a clause in their contract allowing her early exit with minimal penalty. She hadn’t broken the rules.

She had just broken him

Soon the days turned into weeks.

Lawrence pulled every string he had , private investigators, phone records, financial traces. But Eva had covered her tracks well. No one found her. It was almost as if she had help.

He became colder, more ruthless at work. Everyone noticed. His board worried. The press speculated. But he didn’t care.

Even the press noticed his shift how his jaw clenched tighter, how he smiled less. Whispers of a rift in the fairytale marriage filled the tabloids.

He buried himself in work. Cut deals with brutal efficiency. Poured whiskey instead of words into his nights.

But he didn’t stop looking.

Private investigators scoured the East Coast. Old friends were contacted. He even visited her mother in the hospital , searching for a a lclue, anything that would point to her whereabouts but he found nothing.

Nothing.

His desperation turned quiet. Heavy. Like grief.

Every night, he returned to the empty penthouse, haunted by the ghost of a woman he never had the courage to hold onto. And for the first time in a very long time , he wept. Bitterly.

.