Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Ithaca
The name Emma hung in the air of the fifty-fifth-floor office like a physical presence, heavy and suffocating.
Five years.
Sixty months. Two thousand one hundred and ninety days. In that span, I had engineered hostile takeovers of three multi-billion-dollar tech firms, survived a congressional inquiry into my offshore holdings, and bought a penthouse on Central Park West that cost more than a small island nation. I had trained myself to forget the sound of her laugh, the way her hair smelled like damp cedar after a late autumn rain, and the specific, stubborn tilt of her chin when she told me I was marrying my own ambition instead of a person.
I had convinced myself that walking away was a clean amputation. A surgical removal of a weakness.
Now, looking at the two miniature copies of myself sitting on my expensive leather furniture, I realized I hadn't amputated anything at all. I had just buried it alive, and now it had clawed its way back up through the floorboards.
“Where is she, Liam?” I asked, my voice scraping against my throat. I hated how ragged it sounded. Jason Miller did not sound ragged. Jason Miller commanded boardrooms.
Liam lowered his gaze to his plate, tracing the edge of a blueberry with a tiny, dirty fingernail. “She went to the store.”
“When?”
“Yesterday,” Lucas chimed in, his voice small and thin. “Or the day before. It was dark. She told us to stay in the car. She said she had to go talk to a bad man, but she’d be right back. She told us if the sun came up twice and she didn't open the door, we had to walk to the train station and give the man with the shiny badge this paper.” He tapped the folded note on the desk.
My blood ran instantly cold. A bad man.
I stood up so fast my chair rolled backward and slammed into the glass wall with a dull thud. Both boys flinched, their small shoulders jerking upward in unison—a reflex of children who had lived around raised voices, unpredictable anger, or sudden violence.
The sight of them flinching hit me harder than a physical blow.
“Claire!” I roared toward the glass door.
It opened before I could finish drawing my next breath. Claire stood there, pen and tablet in hand, her eyes wide with undisguised shock at seeing me lose my composure.
“Cancel the nine o'clock,” I barked, grabbing my custom wool suit jacket from the back of the auxiliary chair.
“Mr. Miller, the board is already assembling in the conference room. Mr. Sterling flew in from London specifically for—”.
“Tell Sterling he can fly right back to London or go jump into the Thames, I don’t care. Cancel everything for the rest of the week.” I reached down, scooped Liam up under one arm—he stiffened for a microsecond before going rigid in surprise—and grabbed Lucas’s small hand with my free grip. Lucas tried to pull away, letting out a sharp squeak of alarm, but I knelt down just enough to keep my voice steady. “I’ve got you. We’re moving.”
“Where are we going?” Liam asked, his ice-blue eyes searching my face with an unsettling intensity that mirrored my own analytical mind.
“We’re going to find your mother.”
We didn't take the elevators used by the corporate drones. We took my private service lift straight down to the subterranean parking garage, where my black armored Mercedes Maybach sat in a reserved bay. I buckled the twins into the back seat, marveling at how light they were—too light, like birds hollowed out by hunger. I threw the battered backpack onto the floor between them, slid into the driver’s seat, and punched the secure ignition.
Instead of heading toward my penthouse, I drove downtown, my knuckles white against the steering wheel.
I knew Emma’s hometown. Ithaca. A bleak, beautiful college town tucked into the folds of upstate New York, where we had spent two years living in a cramped, drafty attic apartment above a hardware store while I studied economics by day and worked graveyard shifts at a logistics hub. That was where we had built our life before I let my father poison my mind with visions of dynasties and corporate purity.
When I left her, I had mailed a cashier’s check for fifty thousand dollars to her apartment with a typed note: For a fresh start.
She had sent the check back, torn into four neat pieces, taped to a blank sheet of paper. No words. Just the pieces.
It took four hours to drive from Manhattan to the Finger Lakes region. The boys were quiet for most of the trip. They didn't cry. They didn't ask for games or music. They simply stared out the windows at the passing highway, watching the concrete give way to slate-gray skies and skeletal winter trees.
When we reached Ithaca, the town looked smaller, sadder, and more worn down than I remembered. The hardware store where I used to buy cheap lumber was now a boarded-up vape shop. The diner with the cracked vinyl booths had been replaced by a generic corporate coffee chain.
I navigated the steep, winding roads up toward the ridge where the old Victorian rooming houses stood. Number 44 Elm Street.
The house was a rotting Victorian structure with peeling yellow paint and a sagging porch weighed down by old tires and rusted bicycle frames. The driveway was choked with gravel and weeds.
I parked the Maybach at the curb. The engine clicked as it cooled down in the biting autumn air.
“Stay in the car,” I told the boys, locking the doors with a double-click of the fob.
“Is this where we lived?” Liam asked, his face pressed against the cold glass of the back window.
“No,” I lied smoothly, my chest tightening. “Just wait here. I’ll be right back.”
I walked up the rotting wooden steps, the wood groaning beneath my leather shoes. The front door was unlocked, hanging slightly askew on a broken hinge. I pushed it open, stepping into a dim, damp hallway that smelled of cheap laundry detergent, cigarette smoke, and damp plaster.
Apartment 2B was at the end of the second-floor corridor.
The door was ajar, held open by a yellow police evidence tape stretched across the frame.
My breath caught. The world around me dimmed, the sound of my own pulse roaring in my ears like an express train.
I didn't wait for permission. I stepped under the yellow tape and pushed the door open the rest of the way.
The apartment was entirely stripped bare, save for a stained mattress propped against one wall and a single cardboard box overturned in the center of the warped linoleum floor. But it wasn't the emptiness that made my knees buckle; it was the walls.
Scrawled across the peeling floral wallpaper in thick, jagged black marker were words that turned my blood to ice water.
May you like
HE NEVER LOVED YOU. HE LOVED HIS MONEY MORE. YOU CAN'T HIDE THEM FOREVER. PAY UP OR PAY IN BLOOD.
And beneath the scrawled graffiti, in the center of the kitchen counter, sat a single, blood-stained envelope bearing my full legal name: Jason Miller.
