Unfaithful: Web Of Betrayal

It didn’t take him long to realize that Adele Leighton was not her real name. He searched for it on Google and every social media platform imaginable. He even searched for it in the Lancaster city directory. Adele Leighton was not the woman he was with on that ship.

It broke his heart to even smaller pieces. How could she have lied to him like that? Leave him without a trail to find her again?

He was a traveling artist. He worked freelance here and there, which took him on an interesting journey for years. But Ludus had changed him profoundly. He went to Japan afterward, where he learned the Kintsugi technique. The idea of The Heart, of course, came from his personal experience that left a permanent scar.

Roman likes to think that the piece he made depicts his struggle to repair his broken heart. Mending the ceramic with gold took him two years to perfect; mending his own heart was a different story.

While creating his masterpiece, he took on other adventures that led him back to Bhorma at some point. A place where all his memories of the affair came surging back like wildfire. He remembered every nook and cranny he went with her and visited them to torture himself. The sorrow was proven effective in helping him create better art.

Then he went to the store where Adele had made her purchases and took the liberty of charming the sales person into sharing the personal details of a particular customer that splurged her husband’s credit card a few months prior. That’s when he learned the name Declan Hunt, his address, and his beautiful wife, Olivia.

It changed his plans in an instant. He was planning to open his first gallery in Barcelona and decided to return to his hometown Lancaster after finding Olivia Harmon’s studio. He had saved enough money to start something small, but to open a gallery on Pioneer Crest needed a boost in the investment, so he went home to dear ol’ Dad. He’d do anything to be close to the woman of his dream at this point.

He gathered items from other similar artists like himself to join in his gallery and recruited a team to help him realize his dream; all the while, he was drawn to the woman whose sad smile had haunted his sleepless nights. He had to be satisfied to watch her from afar until his plans had materialized completely.

The first time he saw her husband, there was a fire in the pit of his stomach. The man she came home to. A tall, good-looking, mature, successful businessman, not to mention an heir to one of the largest diamond companies in the country. No wonder he didn’t stand a chance. This is the kind of man no woman in their right mind would leave. Unless he has a flaw, a dark secret that he buried deep under his money, they usually have at least one.

He tried to be with other women. He wasn’t crazy and chose a life of celibacy in pursuing someone else’s wife. But there was something about Olivia that he didn’t find in anyone else. She touched him in a deeper level as if he’d known her forever. When they were together, she made him feel like he didn’t have to be anywhere else, making him want to be with her all the time.

Roman would watch her in the daytime from behind the glass window of his room on the fourth floor of his gallery. He watched her through his lens and captured images of her without her knowing it. At night, sometimes he would watch her husband, where he went after work, who he met, where they met. At the end of the day, Declan would come home to their brownstone house and slam the door to leave the rest of what’s going on inside to Roman’s wild imagination.

In the course of his observation, he was sure that Olivia wasn’t seeing anyone else. What happened between them was an isolated case. It gave him a sense of relief. But she was back in her husband’s arms. There’s no trace of him left in her mind, is there? They have no children, yet they make things work to stay together. He often thought he had two choices: leave the couple alone and accept his misery of losing the one he loved, or rescue her. The last thing he could see on her face was the happiness she deserved; she wasn’t getting it from him, and Roman was intrigued to find out why.Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org exclusive © material.

The husband’s speech on her birthday was fascinating; he even applauded afterward from the corner of the restaurant. He’s been staring at her in the dark since he arrived, admiring her stunning beauty. She looked the same as the day they first met, but then again, they’d only met 2 years prior to that day. He let out a long exhale before he stepped into the light with his camera and finally showed his face to her. The look in her eyes when she recognized him was magical. He wasn’t gone from her mind.

And when he walked past her as she came out of the bathroom, he saw her sadness, her trembling hands; he still had that effect on her. If only she knew everything he had done since the day she left him on that ship was all about finding her. His heart was set in stone; he would have her again, one way or another.

She stood before his mended heart; his journey had come full circle. It was exactly like he had imagined it. The person who broke his heart into a million pieces was there to witness what came out of it. She was his love, his muse, his executioner, his savior, and all the universe had conspired to bring him back to the one that would be the gold that fills the cracks of his broken heart.