Chapter 2: The Sound of Unraveling Reality
Clara gasped, her silver tray clattering loudly to the floor as champagne glasses shattered across the marble. She tried to pull her wrist back, trembling violently in his iron grip, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and utter confusion.
"Sir! Please, you're hurting me!" Clara cried out, her voice shaking as she looked around at the judgmental glares of the wealthy guests. "I don't know what you're talking about! This is my ring!"
"Don't lie to me!" Julian snarled, his face contorting into a mask of pure panic and rage. Sweat began to bead at his temples as his grip tightened. "This ring is a one-of-a-kind Vance heirloom. I personally put this ring on my wife Vivienne's finger before she was buried twelve months ago! Who did you pay to dig up her grave? Which grave robber did you buy this from?!"
He assumed he was about to call security, have the girl arrested on the spot, and throw her into a federal prison for desecrating the woman he loved.
But Clara didn't look like a calculating criminal. She looked entirely broken, tears spilling over her eyelashes as she looked down at the emerald. "I didn't rob anyone! I woke up in a public hospital upstate a year ago after a terrible accident! I had amnesia, sir! I don't remember anything before last winter! The hospital staff found this ring wrapped tightly in my hand when they brought me into the ER! It's the only thing I have left of who I am!"
Julian froze. His mind violently rejected the words coming out of her mouth, yet as he looked closer at her wrist, his eyes caught something else—a faint, silver surgical scar near her inner forearm.
It was the exact scar Vivienne had received from an appendectomy when they were in college.
Julian’s heart began to hammer erratically against his ribs. He looked up from her wrist, finally forcing himself to truly look at the maid’s face. Without the heavy makeup Vivienne used to wear, without the elite designer dresses and the styled blonde hair, the woman standing before him in a cheap grey uniform possessed the exact, haunting emerald-green eyes of his dead wife.
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The blue tuxedo he wore suddenly felt like a suffocating cage. Julian began sweating in pure panic as his reality began to unravel. If this amnesiac maid was standing in front of him, wearing the ring that was supposed to be six feet under the dirt...
"Julian," his mother, Beatrice Vance, whispered frantically, rushing over in her silk gown and grabbing his arm. "Stop this madness immediately! You're making a scene in front of the board of directors. Have security throw this lying servant out!"
