Chapter 331
Ivan's phone received a notification. It was an email alert.
He booted up his computer and downloaded the attachment. Soon, a surveillance video file populated his hard drive.
It was the footage was from a corridor on the eighteenth floor of the King's Hotel five years ago.
Compressed to last around fifteen minutes, it shows the corridor dimly lit, with staff passing back and forth until one o'clock in the morning when two women appear.
Despite the grainy footage, Ivan recognized them as Haley and Emily.
Haley was clearly inebriated, and Emily was supporting her down the hallway before they stopped outside a room.
The door swung open, and Emily helped Haley inside.
The video abruptly ended there.
Ivan's gaze narrowed, and he placed another call.
Louis, sounding relaxed and a tad languid, picked up. "What now?"
"The surveillance video ends at two in the morning. Where's the rest?"
"Oh yeah, I remember now, my assistant mentioned the hard drive had limited space. We only kept footage from the first part of the night; the rest got automatically formatted."
Ivan's expression darkened. "No way to recover it at all?"
"The new footage overwrote the old data. Not even the best hackers could retrieve it," Louis yawned. "What's with this obsession over a five-year-old tape? Do you need to remember who you were with? If you can't remember, you could relive the experience. Find a few women to joggle your memory. I bet it'll come rushing back."
Ivan ended the call.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed on the frozen image on his computer screen.
The scene froze as Haley and Emily stood at the threshold of a room, the number on the door illegible.
He couldn't recall what had happened that night five years ago, yet his gut felt uneasy as if something was amiss.
He wondered if Emily was the woman from that night.
After all, the maternity test confirmed that Emily truly was the mother of the children.
That night was the only time he had slept with a woman in a haze. There was no one else it could be other than Emily.
He shouldn't harbor any fantasies.
Ivan closed his eyes, pushing down the myriad of suspicions in the depths of his heart.
...
It was Saturday.
The weather was splendid, the crisp autumn breeze carrying a hint of warmth.
Haley drove the kids to Cuenca's largest concert hall. They had barely stepped out of the car when a black vehicle pulled up.
The car barely stopped before Owen leaped out, bounding toward Haley. "Haley, you look so pretty today!"
He hurled himself into her arms and planted a kiss on her cheek, then pulled a little figurine from his pocket and handed it to Angela. "Angela, I carved this doll by hand, in your image. How do you like it? Pretty?"
"So, you've been secretly carving this thing at night. It's ugly," said Keith, passing by with a tasteless comment.
"How is it ugly?" Owen countered indignantly. "This nose, these lips, these eyes—they're exactly like Angela's. If you say my carving is ugly, that means you're saying Angela is hideous!"
"My sister isn't that ugly," Todd commented coolly. "If you said it was a carving of you, I might believe it."
Owen's lips pursed in feigned hurt. "Angela, do you think this doll looks more like you or me?"
The little girl blinked, chubby fingers reaching out to playfully poke Owen's shoulder.
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