tipsy_buttercup036
Caydon Phoenix had learned to live with ghosts.
Not the kind that haunted old houses-but the kind that lived beneath his skin, in the hollow spaces between his heartbeats, in the phantom ache of something vital that had been carved away.
The doctors called it retrograde amnesia. A neat diagnosis that did nothing to explain the gaping void where pieces of himself used to be.
He had rebuilt his life after the accident-the one that left him in a coma for months. When he finally woke up, he'd emerged into a world that felt fundamentally wrong. Not unfamiliar, exactly. Wrong. Like a song played with crucial notes missing, leaving the melody incomplete.
His family was gone. The car accident had taken them all, leaving him the sole heir to the Phoenix empire. He'd thrown himself into the work, filling eighteen-hour days with meetings and deals, anything to drown out the persistent whisper that something essential had been left behind.
But the feeling never quieted.
It was there when he woke gasping from dreams of dimpled smiles and eyes the color of-what? He could never hold onto it long enough to know. The images dissolved the moment he woke, leaving only sweetness and an ache so deep it felt like grief.
His colleagues thought he was driven. His board members called him relentless. But Caydon knew the truth: he was searching. Desperately searching for something he couldn't name, someone he couldn't remember, in every face that passed, every laugh that echoed, every moment that struck him with dizzying familiarity.
The therapists promised the fragments would eventually come together. Time and patience, they said, as if those words meant anything to a man who felt incomplete. His family's friends spoke in careful half-truths, their eyes holding secrets they wouldn't share. "You had someone," they'd say. "Someone important. Someone you would have died for."
Would have died for.
Who? Why wouldn't they tell him? And why did the not-knowing feel like suffocation?