Despite everything—the wealth, the success, the admiration, the love of family and friends—Aiden couldn't shake the feeling that his life was incomplete.
"What more could you possibly want?" James asked, exasperated, as they sat in Aiden's penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park.
"I don't know," Aiden admitted. "That's what's so frustrating. I have everything. I know I should be grateful. But there's this... absence. Like I'm half of a whole, waiting for the other half."
"That's poetic and depressing."
"It's honest." Aiden stared at his reflection in the window. At twenty, he'd grown into his beauty—tall, graceful, with features that photographers called "ethereal." But he didn't see beauty when he looked at himself. He saw incompleteness.
"Maybe you need purpose," James suggested. "Something beyond business, beyond wealth. Something meaningful."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Charity work? Activism? Use your platform for something bigger than yourself."
It wasn't a bad idea. Aiden had been involved in various charitable causes, but perhaps he needed something more focused, more personal.
But even as he considered it,
he knew that wasn't the answer. The void inside him wasn't about purpose or meaning. It was about connection. About someone.
Those gray eyes haunted him. Every night. Every dream. Sometimes he'd wake up with the phantom sensation of arms around him, of warmth and safety and love so profound it made his chest ache.
"I think I'm going crazy," he told his therapist during one of the sessions his mother had insisted on.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because I'm in love with someone who doesn't exist. Someone from my dreams. How insane is that?"
Dr. Rivers leaned back in her chair. "Tell me about these dreams."
So Aiden did. Described the gray eyes, the feelings of ancient love, the sense that he was waiting for someone he'd known forever but couldn't remember.
"Have you considered that these might be manifestations of anxiety?" Dr. Rivers suggested. "The pressure of your family expectations, the weight of your public image—sometimes our minds create fantasies as escape mechanisms."
"It doesn't feel like fantasy. It feels like memory."
"Memory of what?"
"I don't know. Another life, maybe. I know how that sounds—"
"It sounds like you're searching for meaning in a life that feels predetermined," Dr. Rivers said gently. "You were born into wealth and expectation. Perhaps these dreams represent a desire for something authentic, something you choose rather than something chosen for you."
Maybe she was right. Maybe he was creating elaborate fantasies to cope with the golden cage of his existence.
But when he closed his eyes that night, those storm-gray eyes were waiting. And they felt more real than anything in his waking life.