He noticed the absence before anyone said her name.
Absence had a weight to it. A distortion in routine. A chair left empty too long. A phone that stopped lighting up at predictable hours. Lara Payet's absence sat in the back of his mind like an itch he couldn't scratch, quiet at first, then slowly unbearable.
He stood at the edge of the market in Saint-Denis, the air thick with salt and spice, watching people move past him with the practiced ease of island life. Réunion never hurried. It endured. It watched. It remembered.
He remembered too.
Four years of knowing where she would be at any given hour had rewired something in him. Morning routines. Lunch breaks. The cadence of her evenings. He hadn't needed to ask then. He had simply known. And now—now there were gaps. Hours that didn't resolve themselves. Messages that stayed unread long enough to become deliberate.
That was how it began.
Not with rage.
With confusion disguised as concern.
He told himself he was only checking. That anyone would. That it was natural to want reassurance after investing that much time, that much patience. People liked to forget how patient he had been. How calm. How reasonable.
That was always his favorite part of the story.
He approached the flower stall first. An older woman ran it—sharp eyes, sharper tongue. Lara used to buy frangipanis here when she visited her aunt. A habit he'd learned without her telling him.
"She hasn't been around," he said lightly, fingers brushing the edge of the counter. "I thought maybe I missed her."
The woman studied him. She took in his posture, the careful neutrality of his expression, the way his voice never rose. Women like her had lived long enough to recognize danger that didn't announce itself.
"People come and go," she said. "Island's like that."
He smiled. Just enough.
"She doesn't just go," he replied. "She plans. She explains."
The woman turned back to her flowers. "Then maybe she didn't want to explain."
It wasn't an insult. It wasn't a challenge.
But it lodged.
He thanked her anyway. Politeness had always been his shield.
The second stop was more useful. A cousin of a friend. A man who liked to talk, especially when he felt important. It took only a little prompting—a casual mention of worry, a sigh at the right moment—for the truth to surface.
"Australia," the man said, lowering his voice as if the word itself carried consequence. "She left not long ago. Clean break."
A clean break.
The phrase irritated him more than it should have.
He nodded slowly, filing the information away. Australia wasn't a place you fled to on impulse. It was a choice. Distance calculated in oceans. Time zones designed to make forgetting easier.
She had planned this.
Something tightened in his chest—not pain, but the irritation of being confronted with a truth he didn't like.
He had not agreed to be left behind.
He walked the coastline that afternoon, shoes in his hand, feet sinking into warm sand. The ocean stretched endlessly, indifferent to his thoughts. Lara used to love this view. Said it made her feel small in a good way.
He had never liked that.
Smallness invited ideas like escape. Independence. Silences that didn't need to be filled.
He preferred when she needed him.
The messages began that night.
Not angry ones. Never angry.
Are you safe? People are asking questions. You should have told me you were leaving. I would have understood.
He watched the screen, waiting for the familiar three dots to appear. They didn't.
That was when he felt it—the shift from uncertainty to resolve.
Silence, he knew, was a strategy. And strategies could be countered.
Over the next few days, he made himself visible in the places she used to frequent. Not searching. Just present. He let people see him being patient, concerned, generous with his time. He asked questions that sounded like care and left impressions that sounded like worry.
"She didn't say goodbye?""That's not like her.""I hope she's not being influenced."
He never lied outright. He didn't need to.
The island did the rest.
By the end of the week, he knew enough. The timing. The general area. That she hadn't told her family everything. That she'd kept things vague, careful.
That secrecy felt personal.
At night, alone in the house that still smelled faintly like her shampoo, he replayed conversations he'd once dismissed. The moments she'd gone quiet. The times she'd pulled back just slightly when he reached for her phone. He had thought it was stress. Fatigue. Her tendency to overthink.
He had been generous with his interpretations.
Now he wondered how long she'd been planning to leave him behind.
The thought curdled.
He poured himself a drink and stood by the window, watching the lights dot the hillside like scattered stars. People liked to think men like him snapped. Lost control. Became unrecognizable.
He didn't.
He became precise.
Australia wasn't unreachable. He had family there—people who remembered him fondly, who trusted him. Travel wasn't an obstacle. It was logistics. Timing. Framing.
And Lara had always underestimated how well he planned.
He didn't book a flight yet. That would be too obvious. Too fast. Instead, he gathered what he needed quietly. Copies of old messages. Photos she'd once sent freely, trusting him with pieces of herself. Information about where she'd studied. Where she might feel safe.
Safety was a habit. Habits could be learned.
One evening, he stood outside her aunt's house, not close enough to be seen, just close enough to listen. Voices drifted through an open window. Her name surfaced, then fell away again, wrapped in half-truths and reassurances.
"She needs time," someone said."She's strong," another replied.
Strong.
He smiled to himself.
Strength was a story people told about women who endured too much without complaint. He had always admired that quality in Lara. It made her malleable. Predictable.
Until it didn't.
He sent one final message that night. The kind designed to linger.
I hope whoever you're with understands you the way I did.
No accusation. No demand.
Just a seed.
Then he turned his phone face down and began to plan in earnest.
—
Back in Australia, the days moved with deceptive ease.
Lara Payet woke to sunlight spilling across unfamiliar walls, the sound of traffic distant and oddly comforting. There was a rhythm here that didn't know her past. Streets that didn't carry echoes of old arguments. Cafés where no one watched her too closely.
She told herself the tightness in her chest was just adjustment. Jet lag. Newness.
Calm had a way of feeling suspicious when you weren't used to it.
She spent her mornings walking, letting the city map itself into her muscles. Afternoons were quieter—reading, answering emails, sketching out a version of her future that didn't revolve around managing someone else's moods.
Sometimes she caught herself smiling for no reason.
That was the strangest part.
At night, she double-checked the locks. Not because she was afraid—because habits lingered longer than fear. She silenced her phone and left it facedown on the dresser, resisting the urge to check it every few minutes.
She didn't know that an ocean away, someone was learning how to cross the distance between them.
She didn't know that her name had become a project again, spoken softly in rooms where plans were mistaken for concern.
All she knew was that the world felt temporarily still, like the held breath before a storm.
And storms, she had learned, rarely announced themselves.
They gathered quietly.
Patiently.
Waiting for the exact moment to arrive.