Chapter 4

Aliyah POV:

The next two years were a quiet reconstruction. I moved into a small apartment in Greenwich Village and poured everything I had into my art. I painted with a ferocity I hadn't felt since before I met Harrison. I painted the rage, the grief, the emptiness. I painted the color blue until I hated it, then I painted over it with vibrant, screaming color.

Eddy Brown, my friend and now my boss, gave me a space in the back of his gallery. He was a kind, perceptive soul, a photographer with gentle eyes that seemed to see right through the facade I had built around myself. He never asked about Harrison. He just kept my tea mug full and told me my work was brilliant.

I sold my first painting. Then another. I started to build a small name for myself in the downtown art scene. I was no longer Aliyah Lang, the tragic ex-wife of a tech billionaire. I was Aliyah Potts, the artist.

One afternoon, I finalized the donation of the remaining assets from my parents' trust to a charity for wildfire victims. The act of signing the papers dredged up a memory I had long suppressed, a memory shrouded in smoke and fear.

I was eight years old, lost in the woods during a family camping trip in California. A wildfire had broken out, a terrifying, roaring monster that consumed everything in its path. I was alone, crying, until I stumbled upon another lost child. A boy, a little older than me, with terror in his eyes. His name was Harrison.

He was frozen with fear. The fire was getting closer. I grabbed his hand. "We have to run!" I screamed.

A burning branch fell from a tree above us, landing on my wrist. The pain was searing, white-hot. I cried out but didn't let go of his hand. I pulled him along, running blindly through the smoke, away from the heat. We found a small cave by a stream and huddled inside, coughing and terrified, as the world burned around us.

He was crying. "I can't see," he sobbed, his hands covering his face. "It's all blurry."

I held him, trying to be brave. "It's okay. I'll be your eyes."

I left him there and ran back out into the smoke, searching for help. I ran until my lungs burned and my legs gave out. I found a road and flagged down a fire truck. I remember babbling to the fireman, pointing back into the woods, telling him about the boy in the cave.

The last thing I remember is the fireman lifting me up. I looked back and saw Harrison being led out of the woods by another firefighter. His parents were there. They swept him up in their arms and rushed him away. He never saw me. I never got to say goodbye.

The burn on my wrist left a scar. A small, perfect star, a permanent reminder of the boy I saved and the terror of that day. For years, I had wondered what happened to him. When I met Harrison Lang, the famous CEO, I felt a strange pull, a sense of familiarity I couldn't explain. I pursued him, convinced we were connected by fate. Only to find out he didn't remember me at all.

His trauma had given him face blindness. My trauma had given me a scar and a lifelong obsession with a boy who had forgotten me.

Kassie Crane found me on a Tuesday. I was in my studio, a converted warehouse space in Brooklyn, when she walked in, unannounced. She looked different. Thinner. A desperate edge to her manicured perfection.

"He's not happy," she said, her voice tight. "He thinks you should have come back by now. Begging."

I didn't look up from my canvas. "Then he's an idiot."

"He's been asking about you," she spat, her jealousy a sharp, acrid scent in the room. "He can't understand why you're not destroyed. Why you're thriving."

"Tell him I said hello," I said, dipping my brush in a pot of brilliant yellow.

Her eyes narrowed. "You think you're so clever, don't you? Hiding away here, playing the starving artist. But he'll find you. He always finds what he's looking for."

Before I could respond, the door to my studio burst open. Two massive men in black suits stormed in, followed by a frantic-looking Kassie. And then, him.

Harrison.

He looked around the studio, his eyes filled with disgust. "This is where you've been hiding?"

He saw me, but his eyes slid right over me, landing on Kassie who was now cowering in the corner, a fake-terror expression on her face.

"Kassie! Are you alright?" he rushed to her side, pulling her into his arms. "Did she hurt you?"

"She... she threatened me, Harrison," Kassie sobbed into his chest. "She said I'd pay for taking you from her."

Harrison's head snapped toward me. His face was a mask of pure, undiluted rage. This was not the cold, dismissive man I knew. This was a predator.

He strode toward me. "You crazy fan," he snarled, his voice a low growl. "You've been stalking her for two years. Sending her threats. And now you have the gall to show your face?"

He thought I was a stalker. A random, obsessed fan.

He grabbed the front of my paint-splattered shirt, yanking me forward. His face was inches from mine. "I'm going to teach you a lesson about messing with what's mine."

His hand moved from my shirt to my throat. His fingers wrapped around my neck, squeezing. The pressure was immense. Black spots danced in my vision.

"Harrison, stop!" I gasped, clawing at his hand.

"You don't get to say my name," he hissed, his grip tightening.

Through the haze of pain and oxygen deprivation, the bitter irony hit me. The boy whose life I had saved was now taking mine. And he had no idea.

As my consciousness began to fade, a security guard-his head of security, a man named Mike who had known me for years-spoke up, his voice tense. "Sir... that's... that's Ms. Potts. That's Aliyah."

Harrison didn't even pause. "I don't care who she is," he spat, his eyes locked on mine, full of hate. "She's a nobody."

He finally released his grip, and I collapsed to the floor, gasping for air, my throat bruised and raw.

"I warned you," he said, looking down at me with contempt. "I told you there would be consequences."

He turned to his men. "Get her out of my sight. Get her out of my country. I don't want to see her or hear from her ever again."

He thought he was exiling a stranger. He was exiling his own past.

His men grabbed my arms, hauling me to my feet. As they dragged me out, my necklace, a delicate silver chain with a single star-shaped charm-a charm I'd worn since I was a child-snagged on the doorframe and broke. It fell to the floor.

Harrison saw it. He walked over, his expensive leather shoe pausing over the delicate silver star. For a split second, I saw a flicker of confusion in his eyes, a ghost of a memory.

Then Kassie whimpered from the corner, and the flicker was gone.

He brought his heel down, crushing the small star into a twisted piece of metal.

He destroyed the last piece of our shared history and didn't even know it.

As I was forced onto a private jet, with a one-way ticket to a country I had never even heard of, I knew this was the real end. Not the divorce. Not the public humiliation. This. This violent, ignorant erasure.

---

Harrison POV:

The image of the crushed silver star haunted me. I didn't know why.

I found myself back in Dr. Albright's office, the plush leather couch feeling less like a refuge and more like a witness stand.

"You seem agitated, Harrison," she said, her voice calm and even.

"I dealt with a problem," I said. "A stalker who has been harassing Kassie. It's over now."

"And how does that make you feel?"

"Relieved." But I wasn't. I felt a strange, gnawing emptiness. A sense of profound loss I couldn't name. And I kept seeing that woman's face. The one I had choked. The terror in her eyes. It felt... familiar.

"You've been talking about your ex-wife less," Dr. Albright observed. "For two years, every session was about Aliyah. About her betrayal. Now, you barely mention her name."

Aliyah. The name was a phantom limb, an ache where something used to be. I had erased her from my life, from my company, from my home. And yet, the space she left was a gaping void.

"There's nothing more to say," I said. "She's gone."

"Let's try something different today," Dr. Albright said, her voice gentle. "Let's go back. Back to the fire."

I hated this. The hypnosis, the dredging up of a past that was nothing but smoke and shadows. But I was desperate. The image of that star...

I closed my eyes, and she led me down, down into the darkness of my own mind.

"I'm drawing," my voice said, sounding distant and young. "In my sketchbook."

"What are you drawing, Harrison?"

"Her."

"Who is she?"

"The girl. The one who saved me."

My hand, resting on the couch beside me, began to twitch, my fingers tracing a shape in the air.

When I came out of the trance, Dr. Albright was holding a piece of paper. She had drawn what my fingers had traced.

It was a drawing of a girl's face. I didn't recognize her. But on her wrist, clear as day, was a small, perfect, star-shaped scar. Dr. Albright pointed to it.

"Your subconscious drew this, Harrison," she said softly. "Over and over. It seems very important."

I stared at the drawing, a cold dread creeping up my spine. It wasn't Kassie. Kassie's scar was a long, thin line on her back.

Then who the hell was this girl?