Page 18 of Jetmir

I looked down at the blank page.

The truth was much simpler.

I'd gone looking for Anya Santos because she was Gabriel's weakness.

Somewhere between the dormitory and those woods, she'd become mine.

I chuckled, the sound hollow in the silence of the penthouse. It bounced off glass and steel before disappearing somewhere near the windows overlooking the Pacific.

The ocean didn't care what I had lost. Neither did the world.

My wife refused to see me or even talk to me over the phone. And now, here we were, reduced to this final, clinical act of erasure.

She and her family wanted a divorce. Actually, not a simple divorce. They wanted an annulment. To erase me from her life like we had never existed.

Over. My. Dead. Body.

The documents lay neatly centered on my desk, almost ceremonial in their precision. Thick, expensive paper. Immaculate formatting. The kind designed not just to end something, but to pretend it had never existed in the first place.

The Santos family never did anything halfway.

Every signature line throughout the document was tabbed with obsessive care, every clause tightened until there was no ambiguity left to argue with. They had crossed every t, dotted every i, sealed every possible escape route with ruthless efficiency.

Annulment.

It was a rewriting of our relationship.

If these papers went through, it would be as if we had never happened at all.

Again, over my cold, dead body. We did exist and I wouldn’t allow anyone to erase us.

My gaze lingered on the final signature line of the court documents for a long moment, marveling how something so small could mean so much.

I’d been writing letters every day that we’d been apart, telling her how sorry I was, how much I missed her, how much I loved her, while she’d been gathering papers and documents to erase us.

A sardonic breath left me.

What a fucking irony!

But if she thought I’d allow for our love to be diminished or erased, she didn’t know me at all. I was a determined man, just ask the fucking Triad who I was eliminating one member at a time for daring to set off the explosive in Anya’s vicinity. If they’d done it just to me… whatever. I’d cough it up to everyday business.

Shoving all thoughts of the Triad aside, I picked up a pen and started writing, gripping that ballpoint like my life depended on it.

My forever one and only Mrs. Volkov-Tijuana,

I don’t know if you will ever read this. I don’t know if you would want to. But I find myself writing to you anyway, as though somewhere beyond the distance, there is still a place where my voice can reach you.

This will be the last letter I write to you. Three years of silence, of trying to apologize and make things right, have taken their toll.

I have replayed our history and marriage in my mind more times than I can count. Every conversation, every kiss, every argument, and every instance in which I failed you.

There are things I wish I had done differently, but I won’t apologize for falling for you, for going after you, or for loving you.

From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were the one for me. Through all that has happened and been said, I’ve never stopped loving you. I never will.

We were always meant to be.

I still see us as we were meant to be—building a life together, growing old in a home filled with noise, surrounded by children and grandchildren.