Chapter 1044:

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“Do you remember when I was using that hacker crew to track someone down?” he asked, his voice steady.

Cathryn gave a small nod. “Yes, I remember.”

She could still picture it clearly — those early weeks of their marriage, Andrew always with earphones in, relentless in his search, as though he couldn’t breathe until he found whoever it was. The sharpest image in her mind was the day they collected their marriage certificate. On the ride home, the moment she turned on her phone, Karl had looked at her with barely concealed fury, convinced she had disrupted the signal. The instant she had put her phone away, their target had vanished, and Karl had blamed her immediately.

At the time, she had found both of them absurd. She had even been tempted to simply reveal her identity as Kestrel and help them end the search. To her, locating someone was effortless. But Andrew had clearly wanted to keep the target’s identity from her, so she had held her tongue and waited.

As they grew closer, she noticed the search had quietly stopped. Ethan had even mentioned the hacker crew had been disbanded. She had let it go. So why was he bringing it up now?

𝗧𝘩o𝗎𝘴a𝗻𝘥ѕ о𝖿 𝗋eа𝖽𝘦𝗋𝘴 о𝘯 𝘨𝖺𝗹ո𝗼v𝘦𝗹ѕ.𝗰𝗼𝗆

“The person I was trying to find was a girl,” Andrew said carefully, his gaze dropping from hers.

Cathryn’s eyes narrowed. A man who had devoted that kind of effort to finding someone — that person had clearly meant a great deal to him.

“I met her during the hardest period of my life. I was completely lost, and she gave me something to hold onto — a reason to keep going.”

He couldn’t maintain eye contact and looked away.

“The girl you were looking for was Kyla?” Cathryn asked, her hands tightening.

Andrew nodded.

A heavy, suffocating weight settled on Cathryn’s chest. Kyla had said she had known Andrew for ten years, and every word of it had been true.

All this time, Cathryn had assumed the only other woman in Andrew’s past was the one he had been with before her — a rival she had imagined in vague, abstract terms. It had never once occurred to her that his real first love was someone else entirely. Someone she knew. Kyla had held a place in his heart for ten years.

“Do you love Kyla?” Cathryn asked, her eyes fixed on him.

Andrew shook his head quickly. “She’s not the same person anymore. I loved who she was back then — not who she is now.”

Cathryn’s eyes grew bright with emotion. “If Kyla hadn’t changed — if she were still the person you remembered — would you love her?”

The question seemed to stop Andrew’s heart. After seeing what Kestrel had become, whatever he had once felt for her was gone — he knew that with certainty. What he felt for Cathryn was real. But if Kestrel had never changed? He didn’t have an answer, and the silence stretched.

“When you married me, you still loved her, didn’t you?” Cathryn pressed.

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