The Moment I Realized I Can't Lose You novel Chapter 50

The night was thick and heavy.

The door to the VIP suite on the 16th floor of St. Jude's swung open, and an utterly exhausted Joaquin strode inside.

"Joaquin." Rainey looked up, offering him a sweet smile as she handed his phone back. "Did your meeting finally end?"

Taking the device, he rubbed the space between his brows, tension radiating from his posture. "Did anyone try to reach me?"

That afternoon, a massive crisis had erupted at the branch due to a top executive's gross negligence. Unable to make it back to the corporate office in time, he had commandeered a quiet lounge in the hospital to run a high-stakes emergency video conference. For hours, he had simultaneously directed his crisis management team on how to salvage the broken contracts while personally smoothing things over with furious international partners.

At one point, Rainey had come in, claiming she had dropped her phone in water and ruined it. She complained she was bored to tears and asked to borrow his just to scroll through some videos.

Preoccupied with the disaster on his screen, he had handed it over without a second thought. He had expected the meeting to take an hour. It had dragged on until past 10 PM. And for all those hours, his phone had been in Rainey’s hands.

"Nope." Rainey blinked innocently, her smile never wavering. "Chase was with you in the lounge the whole time, managing the comms for the video conference. Since you two were handling everything, obviously nobody needed to call your personal cell!"

Frowning, Joaquin tapped open his call log. The name he was looking for wasn't there.

He clicked into his messages with Audrey. The last text between them was still from the day at the Dynasty Hotel, when she had coldly replied with one word: [Busy].

His scowl deepened, a flare of genuine annoyance tightening his jaw.

Audrey hadn't sent him a single message in an entire week. Today was their first wedding anniversary. He had been completely buried in an absolute nightmare of a corporate crisis and hadn't had a second to breathe, let alone call her. But it was almost midnight, and she hadn't reached out to him either? Wasn't she the one obsessed with all this ceremonial, romantic nonsense? There was barely an hour left of their anniversary, and she was just giving him radio silence?

"Oh, right, Joaquin!" Noticing his darkening mood, Rainey chirped up brightly. "I actually just saw a picture of Audrey!"

His head snapped up. "Where?"

"On Bianca’s Instagram! She just posted it!"

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