Chapter 7
1608 Words
I stood frozen just inside Bella's apartment, my eyes fixed on something near the dining table.
For a moment I wondered if I was imagining it.
Grief had already made me question myself more than once these past few days, made me hear her voice in empty rooms and catch her scent in fabric that had long since stopped smelling like her.
So I stood there a second longer, letting my eyes adjust, letting the object come into focus before I trusted it.
It was ordinary enough. Bella's leather planner, the one she carried everywhere.
That was exactly the problem.
If it wasn't in her hands, it stayed inside her handbag. She never once left it lying around, not even at home.
Bella treated that planner like an extension of herself, something she'd have reached for out of habit even in her sleep.
So why was it sitting here, alone, on a table she rarely used for anything but mail?
I walked over and picked it up.
The leather was worn soft at the corners, polished from months of being carried against her side.
For a second, guilt rose up in my chest.
Reading it felt like crossing a line I had no right to cross, like I was trespassing into a part of her life she hadn't chosen to show me.
Then I remembered she was never coming back for it.
I whispered, "I'm sorry," to no one, to the empty apartment, to her.
Before I opened it, I found myself looking around the room again, unable to stop myself.
I walked slowly through the apartment, not searching exactly, just remembering.
Every room felt frozen in the exact moment she'd left it. Her coffee cup still sat in the sink, a thin ring of dried coffee clinging to the bottom.
The flowers on the counter had started to wilt, their petals curling inward like they, too, understood something was wrong.
A wedding magazine lay open on the sofa, folded back to a page of table settings she'd probably been debating for weeks.
A grocery list, half-finished, was still stuck to the refrigerator door.
Her cardigan hung over the back of a dining chair, exactly the way she used to leave it after coming home from work.
I found myself drifting toward Bella's bedroom before I even realized my feet were carrying me there.
The bed was still neatly made, exactly the way she always left it every morning.
Bella used to joke that she couldn't think straight if her room was messy.
Her dressing table was scattered with the little things that made up her ordinary life.
A bottle of perfume with only a little left inside. A tube of lipstick. A pair of pearl earrings resting in a small ceramic dish she'd bought at a street market because she thought it looked cute.
My eyes settled on a framed photograph of her and Adrian.
They were smiling at the camera, standing shoulder to shoulder, looking so certain about the future waiting for them.
My chest tightened.
The room wasn't empty.
It felt as though Bella had simply stepped out for a moment and would come back complaining that I'd been snooping through her things again.
Nothing here looked abandoned. It looked like she'd stepped out for five minutes and would be back any second to finish her list, to put the magazine away, to hang the cardigan properly in her closet.
That realization broke something in me all over again.
Eventually I made my way back to the dining table, where the planner still waited exactly where I'd left it.
I took a breath, deep enough to steady my hands, and opened the cover.
At first, it was everything I expected. Work meetings filled the weekday pages.
Cake tasting was circled twice in pink ink. Office meetings, lunch with Mom, a dress fitting penciled in for a Thursday afternoon, a hair appointment the following week, family dinner on a Sunday.
It was all so painfully ordinary.
Almost too ordinary. Almost as though someone had carefully erased every trace of chaos.
I kept turning the pages, slower now, and that was when I noticed it.
Several pages in a row had been torn out. Not one. Not two. Several, cleanly removed, their ragged edges still clinging to the spine like small scars.
Bella never did that.
She hated damaging books, notebooks, anything with pages. She used to scold me for dog-earing paperbacks.
She wrote everything down, every thought, every appointment, every stray idea, and she never once tore a page from anything in her life.
If she had removed these, she'd done it on purpose.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the last time I'd seen the planner.
Had she been carrying it that night?
I could remember the engagement dinner.
I could remember the laughter.
I could remember Adrian standing beside her.
I could remember every awful second at Hollow Cove afterward.
But the planner...
I couldn't place it anywhere.
The harder I searched my memory, the more it slipped away from me, leaving behind nothing but the frustrating feeling that I'd forgotten something important.
I ran my fingers along the torn edges, as if touch alone could tell me what had been written there. It couldn't, of course.
Whatever she'd recorded on those pages was gone, deliberately erased from the version of her life she'd left behind for anyone else to find.
I kept turning through the rest of the planner, searching for anything else out of place.
Nothing stood out again. Finally I sighed, wondering if I was searching for answers in places where there weren't any.
Maybe the missing pages meant something. Maybe they didn't. I honestly didn't know anymore.
I closed the planner.
Then something slipped from between the back pages and landed on the table with a soft, metallic click.
A tiny brass key.
I stared at it for a long moment before I picked it up.
It was attached to a small paper tag, faded at the edges, the string looped through a tiny hole.
Only two words were written on it, in Bella's careful handwriting.
Locker 214.
No address. No company name.
No logo to tell me where this locker might be.
I turned the tag over, hoping for something more.
Blank.
My pulse quickened.
Bella had never once mentioned renting a storage locker, not to me, not to anyone I knew of. And now, for the first time since she died, I had a question that wasn't about grief.
What was Bella hiding?
Before I could think any further, my phone rang, the sound sharp and sudden in the silence of the apartment.
Nathan.
I answered, and his voice came through warm and careful, the way it always did now, like he was afraid too much weight might break me.
"Did you make it to Bella's apartment?" he asked.
"I did," I said.
"Are you alright?" he asked gently.
"I'm just looking through her things," I said.
"Don't pressure yourself," he said quietly. "Grief makes people search for meaning where there isn't any."
He wasn't dismissing me. I could hear that much in his voice.
He was trying to protect me, the same way he'd been trying to protect me since the funeral, standing between me and anything that might hurt more than it already did.
I almost told him about the key. The words were right there, ready to come out.
I stopped myself.
I couldn't explain why, not even to myself.
Maybe I was afraid he'd tell me it meant nothing, that it was just an old locker key from some gym membership Bella had let lapse years ago.
Or maybe, for the first time since she died, something felt like it belonged to her alone, a secret I wasn't ready to share with anyone else yet, not even him.
So I ended the call without mentioning it.
The apartment fell silent again once the line went dead.
I stood there a moment longer, the small brass key resting in my palm.
It felt heavier than something so small should, as if its weight came from everything it might unlock rather than the metal itself.
I looked around the apartment one last time, at the coffee cup, the wilting flowers, the magazine still open to its folded page.
"I don't know what this opens," I said quietly.
"I don't know what you were hiding," I said.
"But I'm done pretending the things everyone else dismisses are meaningless."
"I'll find it."
I slipped the key into my pocket, feeling its weight settle against my hip.
Before I left, I stood in the middle of the apartment one last time.
The silence felt different now.
Not empty.
Waiting.
Every room held traces of Bella's life, ordinary things that suddenly seemed impossible to look away from.
The mug in the sink.
The cardigan on the chair.
The flowers slowly losing their color.
None of them knew she wasn't coming back.
My fingers closed around the key inside my pocket.
Just hours ago, I'd walked into this apartment expecting nothing more than memories.
Now I was leaving with questions.
Real questions.
For the first time since Bella died, I wasn't thinking about what I'd lost.
I was thinking about what she had been trying so hard to keep hidden.
And somehow, that frightened me even more.
Then I locked the apartment behind me and walked away.
For the first time since Bella died, I wasn't walking away from my sister.
I wasn't walking away from my sister anymore. I was walking toward the truth she had left behind.
- Writer
