Chapter 929

 929:
Tears welled up in Linsey’s eyes, her voice cracking under the weight of everything she had held in. “I held on, hoping you’d come… but you never did. After a while, I convinced myself you’d stopped loving me.”
“That’s not true!” Collin blurted.
Yet the rest of his words never came. Everything he wanted to explain tangled in his throat.
With quiet anguish, Linsey looked him straight in the eye. “You’re the head of CR Corporation, Collin. You have eyes and ears everywhere. How could you not find me? When I first left for another country, I lived in fear you’d show up at my doorstep. But months passed… and I realized it was foolish of me to think you’d even try.”
Collin shook his head slowly, eyes searching hers, weighed down with regret and silent fury—mostly directed at himself.
A strained smile flickered across his lips, but there was no joy behind it. “I swear to you, Linsey, I searched. For four years, I turned over every stone, hunted for any trace of you. Nothing came up. It was only after you came back to Grester that I finally heard a whisper of your name. Until then… I knew nothing. Not about you. Not about Gorman.”
Linsey’s fingers stilled mid-motion, the breath hitching in her throat. “You were really… looking for me?” she whispered, stunned.
“Every single day,” Collin said, raising his hand like a solemn vow. “I sent people to search high and low. I flew across cities and crossed borders, trying to figure out where you’d gone. I never stopped. I just… I could never catch up to you.”
He drew in a heavy breath, his face clouding over with grim recognition. “There was a time I even went straight to the Green Group’s headquarters—the city where you and Gorman lived for four years. I left empty-handed. No records. No sign of you anywhere. I even deployed people to dig discreetly. But all I uncovered was that Gorman’s parents had been running things. They claimed they had no idea where he was.”
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That was the moment everything fell into place for Linsey.
A strange laugh nearly bubbled out of her, but it collapsed into a breathless murmur. “So Gorman… with his family’s help… they wiped me clean from the map on purpose.”
The car seemed to tilt for a second, but she steadied herself with a shaky breath. “After Zander and Zenia were born, I was eager to work again. Gorman told me I should rebrand, leave the name Linsey behind. He made it sound reasonable—said the past would only haunt me, that gossip would ruin everything. I didn’t question it. I went along with it and became Aurora, thinking I was starting over on my terms.”
Her breath caught as the realization sank in. “It wasn’t about protecting me. Gorman planned it. He erased me. And with the Green Group covering his tracks, you never had a chance of finding me.”
A shadow crossed Collin’s face, and a cold dread settled deep in his chest.
“If Dolores hadn’t pushed me to enter that design competition… if I’d just kept saying no and stayed away from Grester like I meant to, maybe we really would’ve gone our whole lives without ever seeing each other again,” Linsey said, her voice shaking as the words slipped past clenched teeth and her breath caught in her throat.
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