Brave Enough To Love Again

Chapter 74

Eden

Nobody knows where he is.

Levi's words had been haunting me from the moment he had said them to me at the hospital. It has already been a few weeks since my discharge and there was still no sign of Keane. Levi took care of everything, just like he had promised.

He hired several private investigators to figure out everything about Vic. And they basically found out everything Vic had planned, the pictures he had sent to Keane and the media, his connection at a gossip magazine, and they even found evidence that proved that he had indeed spiked my drink. Someone had posted a picture on a social media platform with Vic in the background visibly putting something in my beer.

There has since been a restraining order in place that prohibits him from approaching me and being in my immediate surrounding. My only involvement in the matter of Vic was my request to Levi to not be too harsh in his punishment, instead of imprisonment my ex was required to go to therapy to work on his problems. I still believed that he wasn't a bad person through and through, and that the man I was in love with long time ago was still there somehow. I am still hoping that one day he would get better and would be able to move on with his life without me.

Levi also employed several private investigators to find Keane, but they were having problems with that task and insisted that it was more difficult to find someone who really does not want to be found. That statement made me even more unhappy than I already was.

Keane did not want to be found.

He did not want to see me.

If only I could have a chance to talk to him and explain everything.

The more time passed without a word about and from Keane the more time I had to think about our whole situation and how it all turned out this way. I grew frustrated and disappointed in Keane for not even giving me a chance to explain and disappearing and just giving us up that easily. I couldn't move on without a final talk with him, so I felt stuck in limbo; a limbo of feelings and emotions that couldn't and refused to be processed to be able to end the chapter of Keane and I and draw a line to finally continue a life without him.

I tried my hardest to live happily just by myself, because I rejected the idea of me being dependent on another human being. But I realized that it wasn't my dependency on him that made me suffer. I could still smile, laugh and enjoy moments with my other loved ones, parents, friends, colleagues, but Keane's absence was undeniable. The smiles and laughters in his absence did not occur wholeheartedly. How could it, when he took a part of my heart away with him when he left.

And then, one day Levi finally had good news for me.

He found Keane.

Levi drove me to a cabin by a lake. The place was exactly where I pictured Keane would love to stay. I reckoned that I probably would have found him sooner than the private investigators, given the knowledge I had on Keane's likes and dislikes regarding places to live and so on. Throughout the whole drive Levi tried his best to lighten the mood and distract me, but I was an emotional wreck. My mind was racing back and forth about what to say to him.

When Levi finally pulled the car over and parked in front of the cabin Keane was supposed to be staying, my brain was empty.

Blank.

Levi got out of the car and told me to wait so he could check out the cabin to see if Keane was indeed staying there as the private investigator claimed. I watched him walk towards the front door and knock. He waited a few moments before the door opened. I couldn't see who was inside and who let him in, so I just waited nervously in the car.