Chapter 12
1512 Words
Two days had passed since Bella's will became public, but the office hadn't forgotten. Neither had the city.
I went back to work anyway, because staying home only gave me more time to sit with my own thoughts, and I'd had enough of that to last a lifetime.
The atmosphere hadn't improved in my absence. People still stared when they thought I wasn't looking.
Some avoided me altogether, taking the long way around to the break room rather than pass my desk.
Others pretended nothing had happened at all, which somehow felt worse than the staring.
I buried myself in manuscripts because editing was the only thing that still felt normal, the only task where the rules hadn't changed overnight.
I told myself that if I could make it through today, tomorrow might be a little easier.
I didn't believe it, not really.
But I said it to myself anyway, because the alternative was giving up entirely.
Late in the morning, reception called my desk. Someone from Beaumont House was downstairs asking for me.
I sat with that for a moment, genuinely surprised.
I didn't know anyone at Bella's company well enough for them to come looking for me, certainly not in person, not after everything that had happened.
When I went down to the lobby, I found a woman waiting near the front desk, somewhere in her late forties, dressed neatly but without any particular importance to her bearing.
She introduced herself the moment she saw me approach. She wasn't an executive, she explained.
She'd been Bella's executive assistant for years, the person who'd sat just outside her office door through every deadline and every crisis.
"Miss Hart," she said.
"I wasn't sure whether I should come. But after everything that's been in the news, I didn't want these ending up in storage."
The conversation felt personal immediately, in a way I hadn't braced myself for.
"I'm sorry for your loss," she said quietly.
Then she explained why she'd come. When Bella's office had been cleared out after her death, management had packed up her personal belongings as a matter of routine.
Because I'd been named next of kin, they'd been instructed to release those items to me directly.
She apologized for showing up during office hours, explaining that Beaumont House had been overwhelmed with reporters since news of the will broke, and this had been the first quiet opportunity she'd had to bring the box herself rather than have it shipped through some impersonal courier.
The explanation made the whole visit feel necessary rather than strange, and I found myself grateful she'd bothered at all.
She handed me a medium-sized storage box, and I held it against my hip the way you might hold something fragile without quite meaning to.
The assistant smiled sadly, watching me hold the box.
"I kept expecting her to come back after taking one of her personal days," she said.
"Personal days?" I repeated before I could stop myself.
The assistant nodded.
"She took a few during her last week. Not many. Just enough that she wasn't in the office every day."
I frowned.
I hadn't known that.
I'd assumed Bella had kept working as usual during that last week.
She'd never mentioned taking time off, and none of us had questioned where she was during the day.
Why hadn't she told anyone?
The assistant mistook my silence for grief.
"I just kept expecting her to walk back through those doors," she said softly.
"Like she always did."
My chest tightened.
I thanked her, but neither of us moved right away.
She looked down at the box with a small, tired smile.
"She talked about you a lot," she said.
I looked up.
"She did?"
"Not in the way people might think." She shook her head.
"Miss Hart wasn't someone who shared much about her private life. She kept work and family separate most of the time. But every now and then..." She smiled faintly.
"She'd mention her little sister."
Something tightened painfully inside my chest.
"She always called you Lena," the assistant continued.
"Whenever she'd accidentally work through lunch, I'd remind her she needed a break. She'd laugh and say, 'If Lena finds out I've skipped another meal, she'll lecture me for a week.'"
I couldn't help smiling.
"That sounds like her."
"There was one afternoon..." The assistant looked toward the glass entrance doors as though she could still picture it.
"She was having a terrible day. Meetings kept running over, two campaigns were behind schedule, and I thought she was going to cancel everything after lunch."
She laughed quietly.
"Instead, she came back carrying two coffees."
"Two?"
"One was for herself." Her smile softened.
"The other was because you'd stopped by unexpectedly. You only stayed for fifteen minutes, but after you left..." She paused.
"She looked happier than she'd been all day."
I searched my memory until I found it. I'd brought Bella coffee after a meeting nearby.
We'd complained about our parents, laughed about something completely ridiculous, then gone our separate ways.
I'd forgotten that day.
She hadn't.
The assistant looked at me kindly.
"Whatever people are saying now..." she said. "That's not the relationship I saw."
Before she turned to leave, the woman hesitated, shifting her weight slightly, clearly debating whether to say something more.
"There was something that always bothered me," she said quietly.
I looked up immediately.
"During Bella's last week, she kept asking me what day it was," she said.
I frowned. That didn't sound like Bella at all.
"She always knew exactly what day it was," I said.
"But she kept asking," the assistant said. "Is Monday here yet?"
Then she told me something stranger still.
"On Friday afternoon, she smiled at me," she said. "She said, if Monday goes well, this will finally be over."
She paused, as if replaying the memory herself.
"She just smiled and said, something important has to be settled first," she said.
At the time, she explained, she'd assumed it was something personal, maybe related to the wedding, maybe some private matter between Bella and Adrian that wasn't hers to ask about.
Now, she said, she wasn't so sure anymore.
She apologized for even bringing it up, said it probably meant nothing at all, that grief made people read significance into throwaway comments.
Then she said goodbye and left me standing there in the lobby, holding a box of Bella's things and a sentence I couldn't put down.
She had no idea she'd just handed me the first real indication that Bella had been expecting something.
Not danger, not exactly. Just something important, something with a date attached to it.
I spent the rest of the workday distracted, barely able to focus on the manuscript open in front of me.
Those words kept circling back no matter how many times I tried to redirect my attention.
Something important has to be settled first.
Bella had been counting down to something. She'd been marking time toward a specific day, making plans for the following Monday, a Monday she never lived to see.
None of it sounded like someone expecting their life to end that weekend. They didn't ask what day it was like a woman waiting for something to arrive.
That thought stayed with me for the entire cab ride home, refusing to loosen its grip.
Claire was still at work when I let myself into the apartment, which left the whole place quiet and empty around me. I set my bag down by the door and carried the storage box to the dining table.
I sat down and slowly began removing her things, one at a time.
Inside were the ordinary pieces of a life.
Bella's coffee mug, still carrying the faint lipstick stain she'd never quite managed to scrub away no matter how many times she ran it through the dishwasher.
Her reading glasses, one arm loose the way she'd complained about for months, always promising she'd get them fixed and never finding the time.
A cardigan she kept in her office because she said the air conditioning there was merciless.
A framed photograph I recognized from her desk.
Seeing those small, unremarkable things hurt far more than any piece of jewelry could have.
Jewelry felt like inheritance. This felt like Bella had simply stepped away from her desk and forgotten to come back.
At the bottom of the box sat a small desk calendar, not the leather planner she carried everywhere, but the plain one she kept on her office desk for quick reference between meetings.
I flipped through it absentmindedly at first, moving past week after week filled with meetings, deadlines, and reminders scrawled in her familiar handwriting.
Everything looked exactly as unremarkable as I expected.
Then I reached Monday.
Unlike every other day in that calendar, almost every appointment on that page had been neatly crossed out, one after another, as if she'd deliberately cleared her entire schedule. Only a single entry remained untouched.
Four o'clock.
Beneath it, in Bella's handwriting, were two simple words.
Don't forget.
- Writer
