I KISSED MY SISTER'S FIANCE

Chapter 13

The desk calendar still sat on my dining table exactly where I'd left it the night before.

I didn't pick it up. I simply sat across from it that morning, drinking my coffee slowly, letting my eyes rest on those two words written beneath the only appointment Bella hadn't crossed out. Don't forget.

They had stopped feeling like an ordinary reminder sometime in the night.

Now they felt like a message she'd never finished, a sentence cut off before she could explain what came next.

As I got ready for work, my eyes drifted to the shelf where I'd placed Bella's old planner days earlier.

That was when I remembered something I'd been too overwhelmed to think about properly the first time. Several pages had been carefully torn out of it, right near the back.

Until now, I'd been trying to understand how Bella died. That morning, for the first time, I found myself wondering whether I'd ever really understood how she lived.

When I'd first found the planner, I'd been too overwhelmed to think much about the missing pages. Now I wasn't so sure they'd meant nothing at all.

Instead of searching for answers immediately, I slipped the planner into my handbag before heading out the door, unwilling to leave it behind for another day.

The workday passed in a blur. I finished what needed finishing, signed off on the manuscripts waiting in my inbox, answered emails I could barely remember composing an hour later.

My mind never really left the planner sitting in my bag the entire time, humming quietly at the edge of every thought.

Claire was already home when I got back that evening, which almost never happened anymore.

We ended up in the kitchen together, both of us reaching for cutting boards and vegetables without much discussion, falling into the easy rhythm we'd shared as roommates for years.

For the first time in weeks, the apartment almost felt peaceful.

While we worked side by side, Claire laughed suddenly, the sound catching me off guard.

"Remember when Bella tried to bake your birthday cake herself?" she said.

I laughed too, the memory rushing back before I could stop it. Bella had forgotten the sugar entirely, so focused on making the frosting perfect that she'd skipped the most basic ingredient in the batter.

The cake had been inedible, dense and bitter, and we'd all pretended to eat a slice before Bella admitted defeat and ordered pizza instead.

We both laughed harder than the memory probably deserved, the kind of laughter that comes easier when you need it to.

Then, slowly, the laughter faded, the way it always did lately.

Because Bella wasn't coming home again, and every good memory eventually circled back to that fact whether we wanted it to or not.

I mentioned, almost in passing, how Bella had been taking personal days from work during those final weeks.

Claire stopped chopping and set her knife down against the cutting board.

"Now that you mention it," she said, "Bella cancelled dinner with us twice that week."

I looked up at her.

Claire explained that Bella had apologized both times, insisting something had come up, never elaborating beyond that.

At the time neither of them had questioned it. Bella was planning a wedding, and busy people cancelled plans sometimes, especially in the final stretch before a big event.

Looking back, it no longer felt ordinary at all.

Claire's eyes drifted to the planner, which I'd set on the table earlier, and she reached over and picked it up without asking.

She flipped through it absently until her fingers caught on the torn edges near the back, and her expression shifted immediately.

"She never tore pages out," Claire said quietly.

I told her I'd forgotten about them myself until that morning, that I'd been too consumed by everything else to give them the attention they probably deserved.

Neither of us knew what had been written on those missing pages.

But we both understood, sitting there in the quiet of the kitchen, that Bella had removed them for a reason, and reasons like that rarely turned out to be nothing.

Rather than pulling the planner apart right then, searching for some answer neither of us was equipped to find, we let the conversation drift somewhere warmer instead.

Toward her habits, the small details that made Bella who she'd always been.

Bella always arrived early to everything, sometimes embarrassingly so.

She answered texts almost instantly, treating an unread message like an unfinished task. She also hated changing plans once they were set, needing everything arranged well in advance so she could control exactly how her day unfolded.

Then I remembered something else, something that had been sitting quietly at the back of my mind for weeks without my noticing it.

That was why the final week felt wrong. Everything she'd always been had quietly begun to change.

I'd texted her twice without getting a response for hours, which wasn't like her at all. She'd blamed it on work every time I brought it up, and I'd accepted the excuse without a second thought, because I never really questioned Bella.

She'd always been the reliable one, the one who had everything figured out.

Now I found myself wondering if she'd been somewhere else entirely during those unreachable hours, somewhere she hadn't wanted any of us to know about.

I got up from the table and spread everything out in front of us.

The planner. The desk calendar. The small brass key, which I'd taken to carrying everywhere since the day I found it.

The folder containing Bella's will sat at the edge of the table, the papers neatly tucked back inside after I'd read them.

For the first time since all of this began, I stopped staring at the objects themselves and reached instead for a blank notebook I kept in a kitchen drawer.

I wrote one sentence across the top of the first page.

Bella's Last Week.

Underneath it, I began listing everything I could remember, every cancelled dinner, every excuse she'd given, every small change in her behavior that I'd let pass without comment.

I wasn't doing this because I thought I was solving a crime. I was doing it because I wanted, desperately, to understand my own sister, to piece together the version of her life I apparently hadn't been paying close enough attention to.

Claire watched me write in silence for a while, her arms crossed loosely over her chest.

"What if none of us really knew what Bella was doing that week?" she asked.

Neither of us had an answer for that. We sat with the question for a moment, letting it settle over the kitchen like something neither of us wanted to touch directly.

I kept writing, moving through the days one at a time as best I could reconstruct them.

Monday, when Bella had mentioned a meeting running long.

Tuesday, when she'd sent me a string of texts about cake flavors. Completely ordinary.

Thursday, when she'd called to complain about a coworker.

Friday, the day her assistant had described her smiling, saying something important would finally be settled if Monday went well.

Between Claire and me, we managed to account for nearly every day of that final week.

Except one.

Wednesday sat in the middle of the week like a missing page, exactly like the ones torn from the back of her planner.

Neither of us could remember a single detail about it. No text, no phone call, no mention of where she'd been or what she'd done.

It was simply absent, a blank space where a day should have been.

I asked Claire directly if she remembered anything at all from that Wednesday, any small detail that might have slipped past both of us the first time.

She thought about it for a long moment, her brow furrowed in concentration, then shook her head slowly.

"I can't remember either," she said.

Wednesday remained a blank space between us, and the harder we tried to fill it, the more obvious its absence became.

I finished writing down everything I could recall, then turned to a fresh page and wrote another heading beneath the first.

People who saw Bella during her last week.

Underneath it, I listed every name I could think of. Claire. Nathan. Adrian. My parents. Bella's assistant, who had brought me the storage box and the desk calendar just the day before.

I stared at the list for a long time, the pen still resting in my hand.

"If I can't remember her last week," I finally said, "maybe someone else can."

I'd spent days asking what happened to Bella, turning that single question over and over until it felt worn smooth from handling. Maybe I'd been asking the wrong question the entire time.

Before I could ever understand how she died, I first had to understand the life she'd apparently been living without any of us noticing, the one hidden somewhere inside a Wednesday none of us could remember.

For the first time since Bella died, I wasn't waiting for answers to find their own way to me.

I was going to start looking for them myself.