I KISSED MY SISTER'S FIANCE

Chapter 14

The notebook I'd started the night before was still sitting on my dining table when I woke up.

I read through everything I'd written before I even reached for coffee. Cancelled dinners. Personal days. The missing Wednesday.

None of it explained Bella's death, not yet, not in any way I could point to and call an answer. But for the first time since the funeral, it felt like I was following Bella's footsteps instead of simply replaying that day over and over in my mind.

Before leaving for work, I folded the page carefully and slipped it into my handbag beside her planner and the brass key. I decided I'd speak to Nathan once the workday ended.

Not because I expected him to have answers waiting for me. Because if anyone knew how to look at scattered pieces without forcing them into a shape that wasn't really there, it was Nathan.

We met at the same quiet café near his office, and he noticed the notebook sitting beside my coffee cup before he'd even finished sitting down.

"You're carrying a notebook now?" he said, a small smile tugging at his mouth.

I closed it instinctively, my hand resting flat against the cover.

"It's nothing," I said.

He raised an eyebrow at me, the kind of look that had always seen through me a little too easily.

"Lena," he said. "You never write things down unless they're important."

I hesitated for a moment before answering honestly.

"I've been trying to remember Bella's last week," I said.

His expression shifted immediately, the teasing dropping away. Instead of interrupting, he let me keep talking, and so I told him everything.

Bella's assistant showing up at my office with the storage box. The desk calendar with its single surviving appointment. The cancelled dinners Claire had remembered.

The personal days that had started appearing on Bella's schedule without explanation. The blank space where an entire Wednesday should have been.

When I finished, Nathan sat quietly for a long moment, turning his coffee cup slowly on its saucer.

"Are you trying to understand Bella," he asked, "or are you trying to convince yourself she didn't choose to die?"

"I don't know anymore," I said.

I let the words sit there between us, surprised by how easily they'd come out, how true they felt once spoken aloud.

Nathan studied me for a long moment.

"That's the first honest thing you've said since Bella died," he said.

A silence settled over the table after that, comfortable in a way I hadn't expected. I opened the notebook again and turned it so he could see the page.

"I've been writing down everything I can remember."

I slid it across the table toward him.

"I realized something."

He looked down at the page, his eyes moving over the list I'd made.

"There are too many gaps."

I took a slow breath before continuing.

"That's why I called you."

Nathan nodded once, decisively, the way he did when he'd already made up his mind about something.

"All right," he said. "What do you need?"

Only then did I ask my first real question, the one that had been sitting at the front of my mind since the café door had closed behind him.

"When was the last time you actually saw Bella?" I asked.

Nathan didn't try to reconstruct her entire week the way I had. Instead, he explained something he'd learned after years of working investigations.

People didn't remember days, he said. They remembered interruptions, the small moments that broke the rhythm of an otherwise unremarkable stretch of time.

"Don't ask people what happened," he said. "Ask what was different."

Then he admitted something I hadn't fully considered before. He and Bella hadn't been close in the day-to-day sense.

Most of the time he only saw her when she was with me, or during birthdays, family dinners, the occasional holiday gathering where our two worlds overlapped.

"But I did run into her once that week," he said.

That detail felt immediately believable, exactly the kind of small, unplanned encounter that might otherwise have slipped past both of us entirely.

He explained that he'd unexpectedly crossed paths with Bella at a coffee shop across from the courthouse, where he'd stopped between appointments.

She'd looked distracted, he said. She kept checking her watch every few minutes, glancing toward the door like she was waiting for someone. She'd left before finishing her drink.

She'd apologized on her way out.

"I'm meeting someone," she'd told him.

"Did she say who?" I asked.

Nathan shook his head.

"No," he said. "And I didn't ask."

He'd assumed it was wedding planning, one more vendor or florist squeezed into an already crowded schedule. He'd never thought to press further.

That was all he remembered. Nothing else stood out from that particular meeting.

Nathan leaned forward slightly, resting his forearms on the table.

"When people know something important is coming," he said, "they usually leave traces without realizing it."

Not because they expected to die, he clarified. Because they were preparing for something, whatever that something turned out to be.

"Did Bella leave behind anything that didn't make sense?" he asked.

I hesitated only a second before reaching into my handbag. The question followed so naturally from everything he'd just said that it felt strange not to answer it honestly.

I set the brass key on the table between us.

Nathan picked it up and studied it carefully, turning it over in the café's dim light. He ruled out a house key almost immediately, shaking his head as he examined the shape of it.

"It could belong to a locker," he said. "A filing cabinet. A storage unit. A safety deposit box."

He wasn't certain, he admitted, handing it back to me.

Then he stopped.

He didn't let go of the key right away. Instead, he held it a moment longer, his brow tightening as though something about it refused to settle into place.

"I've seen this kind of key before," he said quietly.

I waited, watching him.

He turned it over once more before finally releasing it into my open palm.

"I'm just trying to remember where," he said.

For a few seconds, neither of us spoke. Then he leaned back slightly in his chair.

"Actually..." he said after a long pause. "I remember a conversation."

I looked up at him.

"It wasn't about a key," he said. "It was about storage units."

He explained that Bella had called him a few days before she died. She hadn't sounded frightened on the phone, he said.

She'd sounded curious, almost playful. She'd asked him how storage facilities worked. Whether they required identification. Whether they kept records of who rented which units.

He'd assumed she was planning some surprise for Adrian.

"I guess she asked me because I was a detective," he said with a shrug.

"If anyone was supposed to know how those places worked, it would've been me."

He'd laughed. She'd laughed too, and then she'd changed the subject entirely, moving on to something about the caterer.

"I forgot about it until I saw this key," he said.

Silence settled between us again. I lowered my eyes to the brass key resting in my palm, its weight suddenly heavier than it had felt a minute earlier.

I didn't let myself jump to conclusions. Storage facilities used thousands of identical keys every day, and this one could belong to any of them, anywhere in the city.

But for the first time, the question no longer felt random.

Nathan watched me carefully.

"I don't know if they're connected," he said. "I'm just telling you what I remember."

"That might be enough," I said.

That night, after Claire had gone to bed and the apartment had settled into its usual late quiet, I spread everything across the dining table again.

For a long moment I simply looked at all of it, realizing that none of these things meant anything on their own.

The calendar had given me one solid place to start. The planner had given me missing pages. Nathan had given me a new direction entirely, one I hadn't considered until tonight.

I opened the notebook to the page titled Bella's Last Week and added two more lines beneath everything I'd already written.

Storage unit?

Who was she meeting?

I stared at the words for a long time. Neither of them was an answer.

They were only places to begin, small openings in a week that had otherwise closed itself off completely.

I closed the notebook gently and rested my hand on its cover.

For days I'd been waiting for someone to explain Bella's final week to me, to hand me the missing pieces the way Daniel had handed me that sealed folder.

Now I understood no one was going to do that. If I wanted the truth, I would have to find the people who still remembered the parts of Bella's life I'd never been shown.

I switched off the kitchen light and carried the notebook with me instead of leaving it behind on the table.

Somewhere inside those missing days, Bella had left a trail.

And for the first time...

I finally knew where to start looking.