The Jesse caption just got taken down by DeviantArt, sorry 🙄 I'll have to reupload it tomorrow as a subscriber thing.

[sigh]

Must have been the Nurse Joy bulge.

-------

What compels a man to walk out on a booming business and a beautiful wife? Jack Slade, Private Investigator, had worked enough of these vanished husband cases to know the answer was usually a younger, more beautiful wife-in-waiting, somewhere in the wings. That, or he was shacked up in a motel somewhere.

"Give it another week," Jack told his client, the wife. "Chances are he'll slink back home, tail between his legs, begging for forgiveness."

But she wasn't buying it.

"This isn't like him. Something's happened, I'm sure of it," the woman insisted.

Jack rolled his eyes. He'd look into it.

He started with the office CCTV. The footage was odd. There was the man, mid-meeting, tugging at the last grey strands of receding hair, as he went over the quarterly report. Then, abruptly, his posture went slack. Without a word, the man had stepped away from his PowerPoint and walked out of the office, out of view of the cameras. There was an eerie to the last shot. A vacant expression on his face. Empty eyes, like he'd been hollowed out.

That was the last time anyone saw him.

A look into the company figures revealed that the missing man had been cooking the books six ways from Sunday, taking out debts to pay other debts, driving himself to madness, scraping together enough for another month's payroll. Private emails showed that, while his company circled the drain, he'd been fretting about his employees' futures. Maybe the stress had finally become too much for him.

Jack almost felt sorry for him. Until he saw the final purchases the man had made on the company credit card, an hour after walking out. Women's clothing, a one-way plane ticket, and the last of the funds drained into a sketchy-sounding cosmetic clinic down in São Paulo, Brazil. So there was a mistress after all.

Jack found the man in the clinic recovery ward, his legs up in stirrups. Oh, there was a woman, all right. Implants, bone resurfacing, the works. He caught him just as the surgeons were fixing up his face. Another day and he'd have been unrecognizable.

"If you wanted to start a new life, you could have saved your wife the heartache and told her outright," Jack growled.

The man stared at Jack from the hospital bed with that beautiful, doll face they'd given him, his gaze unfocused. "Wife?" he croaked in a high, sweet voice.

"The one you left up in Idaho."

The man blinked. "I've never been to America. I was born in Brazil. My name is Tatiane Moura."

"Knock it off. You're not fooling anyone with that routine," Jack muttered. "If you were born here, say that in Portuguese."

The man stared at him with earnest confusion, on the verge of tears. "But I am speaking Portuguese."

Jack felt a sinking feeling. It was time to call the wife.

"Good news, I found your husband. What's left, anyway..." Jack told the client on the phone. "The bad news? He's not himself. Definitely some mental breakdown. Yeah. Amnesia. And you're gonna want to be sitting down for this next part..."