Never Give Up (A Billionaire Love Story)

by Juliette Jaye

  “At least it’s a nice night, if we’re lucky we’ll get to have dinner on the beach.”

  “I doubt it. Too much risk of sand getting into things. But hey, you never know!”

  “It’s such a nice day out! Wherever we have dinner I hope it’s outside. Speaking of, there’s still a few hours before we have to go, what do you say we go rent some bikes and go for a ride? I still have to get some work done this weekend, but it looks like tomorrow we might get a summer storm, so I think I’ll do it then.”

  When Marissa and I started dating I insisted on paying for any courses she wanted to do at the local college. She ended up taking some creative writing courses, and got a job working for a small local magazine, doing write ups on different cafes, bars and entertainment venues opening up in the city. She was absolutely great at it, and it meant we got to try and whole bunch of different places on a weekly basis. More than that, I knew she loved her work, way more than working at the catering company.

  “Sounds good. I’ll probably have to go in to the office for a couple hours tomorrow too, so that’ll work well.”

  “OK, well, I’m tired of sitting here. Let’s go get some bikes!” And just like that, Marissa was standing, ready to go on the day’s next adventure. I loved that about her, that one second she could be savouring her latte while sitting at a café on a Saturday morning, the next standing at the ready, wanting to go out and do something. As she always told me, summer in New York was shorter than in Florida, and you had to take advantage of the good weather while you could.

  I laughed and got up, and we went down the street to the bike stand where we regularly rented bikes. For two hours we went around Central Park, at a leisurely pace, enjoying the fresh breeze on our faces, the warm sun heating us to the core, before we returned the bikes and walked back to my apartment, having to get ready for the party that night.

  When Marissa was in the shower, my phone suddenly rang. It was the head of IT, Ali.

  “Hey Ali, what’s up?” I asked. For her to be calling me at home on a Saturday was pretty rare.

  “I’ve got some problems here, Nick. Sorry to bug you on a Saturday, but I’m having problems getting the certification for the new app, Jumble Juice, and they’re refusing to talk to me. I’d leave it until Monday, but I figured since we’re launching Friday you’d want this taken care of sooner.”

  I sighed. Unfortunately, I knew this came with the territory when it came to running a company. When the certification hadn’t come in earlier in the week I was a bit worried, but didn’t think it would be a problem.

  “Thanks for letting me know, Ali. I’ll take care of it.”

  I tapped my phone against my leg as I thought about what I had to do. In a few seconds, I’d realized I definitely had to go in to the office to get this all taken care of, all the information about the app that I’d need was going to be on my office computer.

  When Marissa came out of the shower, she knew something was up.

  “Hey honey, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m going to have to go into the office to take care of some stuff, the certification for Jumble Juice isn’t being approved and I need to take care of it so we can have all the files uploaded and reviewed in time for launch.”

  “Oh ok, so you’re not coming to the Hamptons?”

  “Well, you don’t have to go either now, it’s the perfect excuse if you want to stay here.”

  Marissa shook her head. “No, it’s important that at least one of us go to the dinner. You know, the Kerry family reputation, and all that,” she added with a smile. I went up to her and held her close.

  “I love you so much.” And I did. I loved how understanding she was, how much she cared about my business, about my family, and about keeping up appearances, even though I knew some of the older members of my family didn’t approve of me dating “a hick from the middle of nowhere, Florida”.

  “I love you too. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m just going for the free food,” she added with a wink.

  I laughed as I changed into a polo and slacks, good enough for the office on a Saturday night, plus I could go straight to the Hamptons afterwards if I wasn’t too long at the office.

  “If I’m done in about an hour or two I’ll come up for the post-dinner part of things. I’ll text you to let you know.”

  Marissa smiled. “Thanks, hon. I’ll see you in a little while. You get going now. I’ll take the beemer.”

  “You’re amazing,” I told Marissa as I walked out the door, giving her a kiss before I went. Little did I know those were going to be the last words I said to her.

  I went in to the office and dealt with the certification problem. It turned out to just have been a technical glitch, and when I spoke to the person on the phone it all got sorted fairly quickly. Just under an hour after I was supposed to have left for the Hamptons, I was on my way.

  The ride was completely uneventful, and when I got there, I immediately sought out Marissa. I had texted her to let her know I was on my way, and she had replied “great, see you soon!”, but when I got there I had no idea where she was.

  “Hey, Tom, have you seen Marissa?” I asked our host for the evening.

  “No man, she hasn’t showed up yet. Isn’t she with you?”

  “She was supposed to come earlier on her own.”

  “Well I’m sure she’s fine, maybe she just got stuck in traffic or something.”

  I immediately texted Marissa, asking her where she was, but didn’t get an answer, despite the fact that I was checking my phone every thirty seconds.

  As I went out to the front of the house, and the BMW 5 series she had taken over wasn’t on the street, I started to get really, really worried. The next couple of hours became a bit of a blur in my memory. I remembered Cassandra coming over and telling me she thought I should call the police, just in case she got into an accident. I remember taking out my phone and doing just that, and having them tell me they had no reports of any accidents, but to let them know in the morning if she hadn’t shown up.

  I remember getting into my car and driving around for hours, I spent the whole night driving around every single street I could possibly think of in the area, hoping against all hope that I would see Marissa, lost, or with a flat tire. Something, anything. Just let her be safe.

  Panic began to rise up in my chest as the sun came up and I still hadn’t found her. I went back to the house, hoping to see her car. Certain that if I just willed it, she would be there, laughter on her face about the misunderstanding, then gratitude when she’d be told that I spent the whole night looking out for her.

  But when I got back to the house, she still wasn’t there. At this point, most people had left. Tom and Cassandra, and Tyler and his girlfriend Annie had stayed.

  “Did you find her?” Tyler asked. I just shook my head in response.

  “Shit. Ok, time to call the cops and report a missing person.”

  I was in a daze, but I did exactly as Tyler said. They said officially they were supposed to wait 48 hours before they could file a report, but they would send some officers past to take a statement and so they could keep an eye out for Marissa.

  When the police arrived, I told them everything I could remember about the night before. I told them where I drove, I told them what she was driving, what she was wearing, what she looked like. The officers told me not to worry, that this sort of thing was pretty common, and that chances were she just got lost and found a hotel for the night, and her phone battery probably died at an inconvenient time. They told me to hang in there, to let them know if I heard from Marissa.

  Cassandra and Tom had to go back to the city, but gave me a key and told me to stay as long as I wanted. Tyler called my building and had the super check to see if Marissa was there, but he said she hadn’t been back since she left the night before.

  Tyler tried to keep my spirits up, but it didn’t work. It felt like a crushing weight was on my chest. I felt like I was going to throw up. With ever
y minute that passed, I wondered where Marissa was. I wondered why she hadn’t texted back. I needed her to come back to me, I needed her here. I needed to know she was ok.

  When 24 hours had passed without me hearing from her, I finally broke down. I told Tyler and Annie to go back to the city, to leave me here to wait in case she came back. Eventually Annie went, but Tyler stayed with me. We sat in silence until I eventually passed out from sheer exhaustion.

  A few hours later when I woke up, I had those first few seconds of thinking it was all a dream. Until I came back to reality: I’d been sleeping upright in the living room of Tom and Cassandra’s Hamptons house, waiting for Marissa. Waiting for her to come back. But she hadn’t.

  Later that night the official missing person’s report went out.

  Two days later they found her car. It was in a ditch on Fort Salonga Rd, nowhere near where she should have been driving. Worse than that, the car looked completely abandoned. Marissa was nowhere to be seen. A search party went out and hunted all through Sunken Meadow State Park, but still, no sign of Marissa.

  I refused from the beginning to believe she was dead. I didn’t have any reasonable explanation of what had happened to her, but I insisted that if she had died, I would know.

  Still, after four weeks had passed with no sign of her, a death certificate was signed and the family held a funeral in front of an empty grave. I didn’t go. I couldn’t. Not when I knew she was still alive. She just had to be.

  Over the years I would come to alternate between regretting and not regretting my choice to skip the funeral. But I believed what I believed.

  At first everyone thought it would pass, that I would eventually get to the “acceptance” stage of grief and realize Marissa was gone forever. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I refused to accept it was the truth, because deep down I knew it wasn’t true.

  Every day and every night I thought of Marissa. I thought about what she was doing, what kind of situation she had found herself in. I had no idea what she was doing, but I refused to believe she was dead. She was my soul mate. Surely I would know, wouldn’t I?

  * * *

  Slowly, eventually, my life started to go back to normal. I started showing up at the office again a week after Marissa disappeared, and two weeks later even started shaving regularly.

  When you own the company, people always think it’s easy for you to go away and not do anything for however long you want. But when you have hundreds of employees, all of them knowing that their jobs depend on how well you do yours, well, let me just say that while I had a lot of sympathy for what I’d gone through, there had also been some pressure for me to come back to work quickly.

  For a long while I wanted to quit. I was tempted to quit. I wanted to spend every minute of every day roaming the country, looking for Marissa. There was nothing else on the planet that would have suited me.

  Fortunately for me, Tyler was the best friend a person could hope for. He was the only one who didn’t try to convince me Marissa was dead, he was the one who told me I should do my job, and hire a private investigator. He kept me sane through the most difficult time of my life, and I owed him so much.

  Ever since Marissa disappeared, I tried to get answers. I put pressure on the police department, I went through and cashed in every single ounce of political capital I had with people in the police department, at the mayor’s office, and even with our state senator. I know they did everything they could to try and find out what had happened to Marissa, but there was really absolutely nothing. She had vanished without a trace.

  For me, some things didn’t add up. Where was her stuff? Her purse? Her phone? If she’d crashed the car would she have taken those things with her as she walked to get help? It didn’t sound like Marissa. It didn’t sound right. Why was she in that part of the state, anyway? Fort Salonga was definitely nowhere near where we were going.

  I hired a private investigator, as Tyler suggested, when it was obvious the police weren’t going to be finding anything. In fact, I hired two of them. For years, they hunted, searched for clues. But they didn’t come up with anything either. In fact, one of them eventually told me that it was worthless to keep paying him for his time, when he was getting nowhere, and didn’t expect to find anything.

  Everywhere I went, I looked for Marissa. If I saw someone with the same shade red hair as Marissa’s gold locks, I had to get a look at the face. A part of me always had hope, hope that always ended up being dashed. Tyler told me to stop torturing myself. He knew I felt awful about the fact that if only I had gone with Marissa, none of this might have happened.

  It was true, I blamed myself. As much as I wanted to know where she was, I wanted to hurt myself for being responsible. I knew it was irrational. I knew it was common for people to blame themselves in this kind of situation. But I also knew that if I hadn’t taken that phone call, if I hadn’t gone into the office, if I’d just decided to take care of it on Monday, none of this would have happened. Jumble Juice, the game I’d gone in to take care of, had made the company millions of dollars. Hell, sometimes it made that much money in a day. But it still wasn’t worth it. I would have given every cent I had if it meant getting Marissa back.

  But so far, I’d failed. I had no idea where Marissa was, but even though it was almost three years ago to the day that Marissa disappeared, I refused to believe she was gone for good. Absolutely refused it.

  Still, life went on. Eventually the sun came up and I got dressed, went to the gym in the basement of our office building for an hour, then took the elevator up to my office and started yet another day of work. Hopefully this one would be less eventful than yesterday.

  * * *

  Two months later and not much was new in my life. My mother kept trying to get me together with Catharine Argyle, the heiress to a major fashion company, which I thought was hilarious given her name. Still, Catharine had never done anything for me. She was the find-a-man-and-run-a-charity type, I found her to be boring and not much else. So, I would politely decline my mother’s well intentioned attempts at getting us together, and continued growing my company.

  We had just released another two apps, and I was starting to think we needed to either expand extraordinarily quickly or start selling off some of our assets. It was one or the other, we were growing too fast to keep going on autopilot, something had to change. I hadn’t decided what we were going to do yet, but I smiled when I thought about how happy Gregory Bell would be if I chose to sell off some of the company’s apps.

  I was spending virtually every waking hour at the office, when I finally made the decision. I was going to expand the company, grow at a rapid pace and potentially move us into a place where we would be making billions of dollars a year. I felt it was time, I felt the company was ready, but I knew it would be a lot of work.

  That Saturday I finally decided I needed a night to myself. I bought a bottle of my favourite scotch and when I got home ordered for pizza to be delivered. I decided I was going to watch the hockey game, drink a bit and stuff myself with crap food. After all, I’d been working so hard I deserved it, I decided.

  When the doorbell rang, I got up, grabbed the twenty I’d left on the counter to pay the delivery guy, and opened the door.

  At first I didn’t realize what I was looking at. Surely it couldn’t be real, could it? I had spent all these years hoping, wishing, praying for this moment, and now that it was here my brain couldn’t process it.

  I saw the red hair. I saw the red lips. I saw the perfect face. And it still took me a while for everything to connect.

  When everything clicked, I immediately took Marissa into my arms. I had to touch her, I had to know it was her. In seconds we were both crying. I was clutching her to me, as hard as I dared so as not to hurt her. Tears were streaming down my face, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t cried in at least twenty years, not even when my father died, but I wasn’t ashamed of it in the least.

  “How…” was the only thing I managed to s
ay. I held Marissa, breathed in her hair, the scent of her, the feel of her skin that I’d missed for so long.

  Finally, we broke apart. Marissa had been crying as well, and I immediately brought her in to the apartment.

  “What happened, Marissa? God, I’ve missed you so much.” My voice cracked as I said the last sentence. As I finally got a good look at her, I could tell she’d been through a lot. She had always been slim, but now she was borderline emaciated. Her light skin was now completely pale. There were a couple bruises and scratches on her skin.

  Marissa shook her head. “I can’t talk about it right now. Please. I can’t.”

  Immediately I knew something bad had happened. I had suspected before, obviously, but now that she refused to talk about it, I knew. She started to cry once more, and this time I had a feeling it didn’t have anything to do with our reunion.

  “Ok. It’s ok Marissa. You don’t need to talk about it. Come on, let me take care of you.”

  I took her into the bathroom and she let me undress her and help her into a warm shower. I left the $20 for the pizza guy in the hallway with a note telling him to enjoy the pizza. Food was the last thing on my mind now. I gently scraped off all the blood and dirt that had been on her. It made me so angry to know someone had done this to her, that something had happened, and even though I wanted, needed to know what had happened, I could tell Marissa didn’t want to talk about it yet, and I had to respect her wishes.

  When I had put Polysporin on her scrapes and gotten her to bed, Marissa fell asleep almost immediately. I put her into bed and told her she was safe.

  “Can you hold me until I fall asleep?” she asked, and I very, very happily complied. It was amazing to feel her once more, to have her skin press against my own. I breathed in her scent as I wondered what had happened to her, why she was back now, and why she knocked on my door looking like hell.

  When Marissa’s breathing slowed and deepened I knew she was fast asleep. I got up carefully and called Tyler.