Filed To Story: The Lingering Kiss of Farewell Novel
He’d done this because, after his conversation with Wil in the bar, he’d realised Wil was out there moving around him, where Marilyn Riddley was concerned without telling him, and he’d come to the decision, he didn’t like it. That Wil knew something that he didn’t and wasn’t willing to part with it, and Calvin wanted to know what it was for himself.
The information he’d just received from Andrew showed him that everything about Marilyn Riddley also aligned with her being Marrin, just like he’d suspected. This woman just appeared out of nowhere eight years ago. She’d been an author before that, but Marilyn, In the flesh and blood, just didn’t exist until eight years ago.
She’d never had a driver’s license until the day after Marrin got on that plane. Never owned anything at all until just a week prior to their divorce being finalised. The first time she’d bought a phone in her name was the day after Marrin was supposed to get on that flight. After everything in Marrin’s world had been shut down that very day as well. Then Marilyn Riddley had just appeared out of thin air.
Andrew was good, and he was glad that he worked for him. Andrew had hacked everything on the woman in the past two days and found out many things about her, including that she lived in a town called Bedford, Virginia. That her two sons. They were twins who were seven years old. He knew what kind of car she drove, or would be once she got the all??lear. A Toyota Rav4 Hybrid 2024 model.
What he was sitting here just staring at now was her twin sons’ names, Callum and Vincent Riddley, and although there were no pictures of them. Because Marilyn had no social media that wasn’t related to her writing career, and his guy had dug into that and had underlined for Calvin, that even that account wasn’t managed by Marilyn, but by her agent, Lisa Stevens.
Calvin had been on that site many times himself. He recalled that there were no pictures of Marilyn or her children on there, just book covers, blurbs, and release dates, all career??elated things, Bar the incident between him and her. Although, as he checked it now, there was a picture of Marilyn up on that sight, one of her which showed her sitting in what was stated to be her writing studio; she was sitting at her writing desk.
It looked neat and tidy, and she had framed prints of her book covers on the wall behind her. Calvin sighed softly to himself. She looked so much like Marrin as she smiled up at the camera, and he was trying to let it all go, but as his eyes moved from his phone, back to the email and to the children’s names and their age. Callum, Vincent and they were seven. He couldn’t un??ee it, Calvin in the first three letters of their names. when they joined together. Was that why she’d never allowed her lawyer to bring them up? Specifically withheld that information, he could recall seeing them in the ICU ward pressed up against the glass door watching their mother, waiting to be allowed in, to see her.
Those two boys both had black hair. He now realised, what if she really was Marrin? And those boys were his and hers? They’d had s*x just once when she was not on birth control, so it was entirely possible she could have gotten pregnant that one time. If Marilyn was Marrin and those boys were their children, then he and
Marrin had a family. Something he knew she wanted.
Something that he himself had wanted, and he’d ruined everything. If she was Marrin, she’d raised them. without him, on her own and he’d missed everything. He had to know now, and as much as he’d told Wil he was going to leave it alone, and he had tried to do just that, it had been over a month, and he’d stayed away.
Stayed away and left it alone until Wil himself had pricked his curiosity and now Calvin couldn’t ignore what was before him. A woman who looked exactly like Marrin, not just in appearance, but in her mannerisms and handwriting, the age of the twin sons, and their names as well.
There was one thing that was still bothering him as he sat there thinking about what he was going to do, and It was that Marilyn had been diagnosed years ago with amnesia. Wil had told him that himself. He’d gotten angry at hearing the words and ended the call to him over it. Hadn’t wanted to hear those words at all. Hated that excuse.
He was sitting tapping his fingers on his desk, and he knew deep down he wasn’t wrong, Marilyn was going to in fact be his Marrin. He chewed on his lower lip as he sat and thought about that very thing. That he’d not been wrong about it at all. He could feel it, the tightening of his chest as he actually came to the realisation of everything he’d done to Marilyn, who was in fact Marrin.
He’d hurt her, stalked her, assaulted her and forcibly made her expose herself to him, and then she’d fallen down those stairs and gotten a head injury as well as broken bones. He’d done all of that to her. He’d harmed her, and not just physically, but he’d scared her that first time they’d been face to face, been menacing towards her on purpose. He had intended to scare her to get her to out herself, thinking she was playing some selfishly cruel game with him. Only she couldn’t give him what he wanted, because she didn’t recall him at all.
He closed his eyes as he realised just how badly he’d screwed things up. He had no one to blame but himself. Wil had tried to contain him, pulling him into line, but Calvin couldn’t be contained. He’d been in the throes of his obsession and now that was all Marilyn could see where he was concerned. That he was a monster and not the man she’d once loved. He scrubbed a hand over his face and pushed it up through his hair, he didn’t know what to do about that knowledge right his, minute.
But already he could feel the guilt of it all. How was he going to get her to come to him, to even explain his own actions when he couldn’t even understand them himself? There was no way right this very minute that he saw Marilyn even considering wanting to speak with him, let alone allow him to be near her, or their children.
Everything he’d ever wanted was right there in Bedford, Virginia and he couldn’t even do anything about it, without being arrested. He didn’t even know how he could convince her that she was Marrin after all of this. She was never going to believe him, not after all he’d done, and she certainly wasn’t going to smile at him the way she used to. Or let him be a part of her life. His own actions towards her only brought about fear from her.
The w woman he loved was afraid of him, and he’d done that all on his own. That first encounter he’d aimed to put fear into her, and he’d more than succeeded. The question now was how did he go about fixing it? To right the wrongs he’d done to her, and have her see him in a different light.
Calvin sat there and thought about that, how to go about getting what he wanted, and realised that first and foremost he needed to get solid proof that she was Marrin, that the twins were his. Something that he could put in front of Wil to shut him up when he realised Calvin was still stalking the woman from a distance.
He knew Wil was going to be pissed off about it, but solld proof, if he could get that, he could make Wil help him where Marilyn was concerned. He picked up his phone and called his guy, Phillipe. He was a private Investigator that he sometimes used to help him out, when he couldn’t find something suspicious with a company or someone he was dealing with.
He would get him to go and take photos of the twin boys to see just what they actually looked like. He needed to get confirmation of what he now suspected; that they were his and Marrin’s or Marilyn’s. But seeing as he wasn’t allowed anywhere near her, and he didn’t want to upset her or scare her, by just turning up at her door and claiming her or the boys as his, something she was not likely to appreciate at all, he had to use someone else. Someone he could trust to do the job as asked,
He was now fighting a part of his brain that was screaming at him to go to her home in Bedford and not only confront her, but tell her she was Marrin and bring her and the boys here to Cliffside Manor, so they could all be under the one roof. That obsessive side of him was still there, he could feel it, and he was going to have to fight it off, because he couldn’t do it.
Not only would it just put more fear into her where he was concerned, it would likely see the twins be scared of him as well. Calvin also knew he would be arrested for the k********g of not just her but the twins, and there would be charges laid against him once more, ones that would likely see him go right to jail, regardless of who he was.
And all because Marilyn had no idea who she actually was; that being Marrin. All Marilyn would see, know and feel was the terror of her stalker having found her and come for her once more. The twins would also only see that as well. If he just went and took them and there was no proof of who he was to them, Marilyn and the boys would likely never understand him, and always hate him, he couldn’t have that, didn’t want that.
/10) >
Marilyn
The third file she opened showed her Calvin in another airport. He was wearing a full three??lece sult, and there was a very large bouquet of brightly coloured flowers handed to him by a man waiting for him. She saw him walk through that airport, a smile on his face.
He stopped and waited by a gate. She could only imagine it was the one that the flight he was waiting on was going to taxi to, for disembarking. Marilyn watched him pull a small box from his inner jacket pocket and open it, look at the contents and then close it once more. She saw him standing there waiting for a plane to land.
It was all true, she realised, that Calvin had been going to propose to Marrin when she got off that plane. It was all there for her to see, the tale William had told her of Calvin’s plans for a grand gesture of his declaration of love, was all laid out before her to see, undeniable proof of his intention that day.
Then she got to see, to her own horror, as the plane Calvin was waiting on, the one he had put Marrin on, crashed landed. The footage of it was from a camera on the outside of the terminal, and she saw it all. Then the footage switched to inside the airport, before the crash even happened, and she was watching Calvin’s reaction to what he himself was seeing on that day.
He’d picked up the sound of it before turning to see the crash. She saw the way he looked at the plane, the way those flowers and the small box fell from his hands, as he registered what he was seeing, the very plane
Marrin was on crash landing.
He’d just let go of everything in his need to track that plane down the runway. She saw him as he ran through the airport, his eyes never leaving the windows, the sight of that plane, in his disbelief of what he was seeing. The way, he came to a standstill, both his hands on the glass of the window before him as he watched that plane burst into flames.
His shake of the head, the way he kind of just fell down to his knees as he watched on. She could only imagine in his grief, a hand still pressed to the window before him, as the other kind of just went limp and dangled at his side, as he watched the tragedy of everything unfold before his very eyes. He didn’t really move for many minutes and then something out there caught his attention, and he was just up and gone, racing off down the airport once more.
It was hard for her to watch that, and tears welled up at seeing him in such a state, trying to comprehend how he must have felt at that moment. She didn’t think she could understand how he felt, but she knew it was terrible, just from watching him.
The fourth file, something she hesitated to open, due to the last one… did she want to know anymore of what he went through? She had to take breath and blot the tears away from watching the last file before clicking into it.
It was filled with many things, mostly footage of Calvin all over the airport in Italy, trying to get answers as he looked for Marrin in those first few hours, as survivors were taken off the plane and the few days that followed, then there was some footage of him at the hospitals over there, she could only imagine where the survivors had been sent to, as he searched for her.
There were newspaper articles about all that happened, including ones about Calvin searching for his wife,
Matrin, who was supposed to be on the plane. Then flight plans logged of his own private jet, as he tracked and traced Mamin backwards to America and that fight she never got on. She knew he was trying to find out where she had gotten off the plane. When he realised, she wasn’t on the one that had crash landed
Marilyn bit her lip as she watched him. She could actually see his distress and the way he became more and more dishevelled over the days and then weeks of trying to find Marrin. He’d been clean shaven and all dressed up that day, and when he’d returned to America, he’d been in jeans and tee shirt with a beard. growing, looking a right mess compared to how even she herself had seen him weeks ago in Houston.
Marilyn closed out of the file, knowing she would never ever watch it again. His pain had been real, and she knew she’d just watch him lose the woman he loved. She’d just seen many things that made up the timeline of her disappearance.
William had presented to her all the facts as he’d known it, and he’d told her the reason why Calvin had divorced her, it was just to get out of that contract marriage so he could propose properly and tell her he loved her. Everything she’d just watched aligned to everything she’d read and been told by William
There was a recording of what Calvin had heard when she called him. In the next file, the answering machine in Calvin’s apartment, it was labelled. Marilyn recognised her own voice stating his name, and then she heard the sound of what she knew to be her own car accident.
Of her screaming as the car hit other cars and then ran off the road and rolled down the embankment. All things she knew from watching the dash cam footage herself of that very accident. Her scream was cut off, and she thought that was due to her phone being destroyed. It had never been recovered.
Marilyn couldn’t even begin to imagine how Calvin must have felt during that time in his life, and then to find out that she wasn’t even on the plane, all his grief and trauma of what he’d seen, and felt that day, the days that followed, about putting her on that plane, she couldn’t even begin to comprehend it all.
Only for him to come home and hear that message of her screaming and being in an accident, knowing she wasn’t on the plane, but it sounded like she was. She knew it was that one recording in his apartment that made him hate her. He thought she’d done it on purpose to make him feel guilty and that he’d killed her. Likely where his obsession had started, she thought sadly.
Marilyn sat there and wondered if she knew she was pregnant when they were getting a divorce. She didn’t recall anything from that time. She had no idea if she’d been keeping a secret from him or not. But right this very minute she hoped not, that man, it appeared had been through hell already. She didn’t want to cause him any more pain than what he’d already suffered.
From what she had seen, her own younger self’s reaction to him, before all of the fall??ut, out the front of the airport here in Houston, her tears and anger, the way she had kissed him back, a part of Marilyn, even though she didn’t recall it, already believed that woman she used to be, Marrin. Had been in love with Calvin.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
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