Unmasked My CEO Ex-Husband’s Regret novel Chapter 289

The nightmare hadn't been filled with monsters or complicated plots. It was painfully simple: she had seen her father, she had called out for him with all her might, and Julian had walked away without casting a single glance backward.

And then, she had jolted awake.

Waking up hadn't brought relief, because reality was exactly the same. Her father was still gone.

In the disorienting aftermath of the dream, a crushing realization had crashed over her. Not only was her father physically absent from this new apartment, but she hadn't seen his face or heard his voice in days.

In the past, if she went this long without seeing him, she would just steal a phone to call or text him. But now, her mother had told her the truth: her father was abandoning them.

Because she had stubbornly refused to call or text him out of solidarity with her mother, Julian hadn't bothered to contact her, either.

Just like in the nightmare, he was ignoring her. He was walking away. He was abandoning her.

The truth was, Melody missed her father desperately, but she was utterly terrified to say it out loud, paralyzed by the fear that admitting it would break her mother's heart.

In that terrifying moment of waking up entirely alone, overwhelmed by a suffocating sense of abandonment, she hadn't known how to process the trauma. All she knew was that she needed to find her mother.

Even now, nestled safely in the dark, she still couldn't bring herself to confess the true depth of that bone-deep insecurity.

"Did you miss Daddy?"

But Elara didn't need her to spell it out. Through those few, halting sentences, she felt the raw, trembling panic radiating from her daughter. "Do you want me to take you to see him?" she asked softly.

In the pitch black of the bedroom, Melody's eyes snapped open. A flicker of absolute disbelief, immediately followed by a spark of pure, unfiltered joy, illuminated her tiny face. But the light died almost as quickly as it had ignited.

Silence stretched for so long that Elara almost thought the little girl had fallen back asleep. Finally, the tiny body shifted against the sheets.

"No," she whispered.

Melody adjusted her position, shimmying up the pillow until she was level with Elara, throwing her warm little arms securely around her mother's neck. "I don't want to anymore."

When she had first woken up from the nightmare, every fiber of her being had screamed for him.

But after sitting with the thought, after crying until she was empty, she truly didn't want to see him.

Because deep down, she knew the devastating truth: the father who had walked out on her, the father who hadn't bothered to call, didn't miss her nearly as much as she missed him.

If she threw a tantrum and demanded to see him, if she called him crying, he might just look at her with that cold, empty expression from her dream. He might just turn around and abandon her all over again.

She couldn't survive that heartbreak a second time. It was better to just let him go.

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