Harumi paced from one side of the living room to the other. She’d called Seungri cell phone at least a dozen times and gotten his message service every time. She’d left messages with the operator, at his Paris office, at his office in London, even with his grandfather’s housekeeper. Every message had said the same thing. Please call.

He hadn’t. Not all day yesterday as she vacillated between tortured tears and blazing fury. Not through a sleepless night when she had tossed and turned in a bed too big for comfort without him in it. She’d tried to rest for the baby’s sake, but every time she closed her eyes images of him telling her he planned to marry intruded, or worse…his expression of revulsion when she’d told him she was pregnant.

It was now close to one o’clock in the afternoon and she’d spent the last hour calling every contact number she had for him again. It hadn’t done any good. She couldn’t sit down. She was so strung out and edgy, she felt like she’d taken a couple of the diet pills some of her fellow models used to control their appetite.

One thought played itself over and over again in her brain. Seungri believed she’d taken another lover. What kind of trust was that? He really did think she was some kind of .

The thought sent her to her knees only to hop up again at the sound of a key turning in the lock. She flew to the door. He’d come back. Relief surged through her in unstoppable waves. He’d realized how idiotic he’d been to believe she could make love to another man. She wrenched the door open.

“SeungHy—” Her voice choked off mid word. It wasn’t Seungri at the door.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded in English before remembering where she was and repeating her question in French.

The stocky bald man pushed his way into the apartment, followed by an efficient looking woman and another man, this one lanky and sandy haired. The woman spoke. “I am Mr. Lee’s facilities manager. I am here to oversee your vacation of the apartment.”

Harumi barely made it to the bathroom before she lost the little bit of food she’d forced herself to eat that day. When she came out, the brunette was directing the two men in the packing of Harumi’s things with an officious looking clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other.

The facilities manager used her pen to point at a small figurine Seungri had bought Harumi when they were in Barcelona together. The bald man picked up the statuette and began wrapping it in paper before putting it in one of the numerous boxes the moving team must have brought with them.

Harumi stood in appalled fascination as every item she could claim as her own was packed in a similarly efficient manner from the living room. The last three days had been nightmarish, but this was beyond a nightmare. It was so horrifyingly real, she almost buckled from the pain of it.

“He sent you to evict me?” She asked the words in a bare whisper, but the other woman heard. She turned to Harumi, her face impassive.

“I have been sent to facilitate your move, yes.”

“Have you evicted many of his ex-lovers?” Harumi asked. The other woman’s eyes twitched.

“Your relationship with Mr. Lee is not my business. I am simply following through on my instructions.”

“War criminals say the same thing in their defense.” tightening, the brunette turned away without answering.

Harumi did not push it. Instead, she marched into the bedroom she had shared with Seungri and started packing her clothes. She didn’t want those men touching hem. She already felt violated by their presence and the way they went through her home removing her things, removing traces of her.

Two hours later, the packing was done. Harumi returned to the living room and surveyed the neatly piled boxes the two men were preparing to transport out of the apartment.

Were they going to take them down to the lobby and leave them there? Out onto the street? Suddenly emotions that had gone numb in the face of SeungHyun’s cruel ejection of her from his life, came back to life and Harumi shouted, “Stop!” as the bald man went to pick up one of the boxes.

The man stopped.“Some of the items you packed don’t belong to me. You’ll have to wait while I sort through the boxes and take them out.”

“I had a very specific list from Mr. Lee,” the brunette began to say.

“I don’t care.” Harumi stood to her full five feet, nine inches and glared the other woman down.

“I’m not taking his property with me.” The movers must have read her determination on her face because they didn’t attempt to dissuade her again. It took forty-five minutes, but in the end she had removed every single thing Seungri had ever given her.

She’d gone through her clothes as well, chucking y lingerie from her suitcases along with designer dresses…anything and everything he had bought. When she was done, there was a pile of objects mixed with crumpled manila newsprint on the living room floor along with two stacks of neatly folded clothes.

“There’s one more thing.”

The brunette just nodded, her eyes registering some emotion after watching Harumi’s feverish attempt to purge her things of all items related to her ex-lover.

Harumi picked up her purse and pulled out the white stick she’d replaced yesterday after the disastrous confrontation with Seungri along with the jewellery case he’d left lying on the café table.

She dropped them both on top of the lingerie pile. She stood up and grabbed the handle of her suitcase, slung the matching overnight case over her shoulder and exited the apartment.

Harumi waited a week to hear from Seunri, hoping time would calm him to the point of rationality. Seven days after she’d been evicted from their apartment, she read an article in the society column announcing his upcoming wedding to Phoebe. The girl looked about twenties and as innocent as any al bride should be.

Harumi checked out of the hotel she’d been staying in, arranged for her possessions to be shipped to Japan, terminated her contract with her modeling agency, closed her checking account, cancelled her credit cards and bought a ticket back to her homeland in the name of Harumi Hitome. Alexandra Kogemi, fashion model and ex-lover of British billionaire, Lee SeungHyun, ceased to exist.

A little over two months later, Harumi walked out of the prenatal clinic into the hot, sticky air of early autumn in Tokyo. She glanced down at the snapshot of her recent ultrasound. She’d put the videotape in her bag, but hadn’t been able to tuck the photo away.

She was enthralled with this proof of the baby growing in her womb. The baby she could not yet feel or even see in her only slightly thickened waist line. It was a boy. A part of Lee SeungHyun she was free to love, someone who would return her love. Even weakened by constant morning sickness and exhausted from her pregnancy, she wanted to shout for joy.

Desperately wanting to share her news with someone, she flipped open her cell phone and dialled her sister’s number. She got the answering machine and opted not to leave a message. She could tell her sister the news when she went home later.

She considered and discarded the idea of calling her mother. Harumi was not up to another dose of “You’ve brought shame to the family name.” Compulsion she could not deny had her dialling the number to the Paris apartment. There had been no news of Seungri wedding in the New York society pages.

Fool that she was, she couldn’t stop herself from looking and even more foolishly hoping. Had he come to his senses? Called off the wedding?Perhaps the latter was too much to hope for, but surely after two months he would have had enough time to calm down and realize Harumi would never have been unfaithful to him.

The phone rang several times and Harumi remembered belatedly it would be the dinner hour over there. Perhaps he was out, or not in Paris at all. She let the phone continue to ring, knowing she didn’t have the courage to call his cell.

For some reason this was news she needed to tell him when he was in the apartment they had shared. The other line picked up.

“Hello?”

Harumi almost dropped her phone. It was a woman’s voice at the other end of the line. She forced her vocal chords to work, praying the unfamiliar voice was that of a new housekeeper and not Seungri newest woman.

“Hello. Is Mr. Lee available, please?”

“I’m sorry, he’s out. This is Mrs. Lee. Can I help you or would you like to leave a message?” Mrs. Lee. Harumi stopped breathing. The bastard had gone through with it. He’d married another woman while Harumi was pregnant with his child.

Funny, until that very moment, she hadn’t truly believed he would do it. And it was only in the absence of all hope that she realized how much she’d been living on the unspoken faith in a man who cared nothing for her and clearly never had.

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Did you want to leave a message for my husband?”

“No. I…” The words simply trailed into nothingness as the joy that had buoyed her up since discovering she carried Seungri’s son drained away.

“Who’s calling please?” The young woman, Phoebe, no…Phoebe Lee now, sounded impatient.

Because Harumi was so emotionally devastated, she answered the other woman’s question without thought. She couldn’t think. Her brain had ceased to function. She gave the name an occupant of the Paris apartment would expect to hear.

“Alexandra.”

“Miss Alexandra, where are you? SeungHyun has been looking for you. He’s desperate about the baby.” Seungri had told his wife about her, about their baby?

Harumi pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it in her hand as if she didn’t know how it had gotten there. She could hear the woman’s voice, but not the words she was saying. She sounded frantic. Harumi cut the connection without putting the phone back to her ear.