12. The Note

12. The Note

Dr. Jeff sat with Tania after her discharge, his voice gentle but direct.

“A transplant is still on the table,” he said. “If we find a match in time.”

“How much would that cost?”

He told her, and Tania didn’t react. The number wasn’t worth reacting to. It might as well have been the moon.

“I don’t need a transplant, Dr. Jeff,” she said quietly. “I need the investigation finished. I need my mother’s name cleared. If I get that much, I can go peacefully.”

He didn’t argue with her. He just looked like he wanted to.

She left the hospital alone and walked straight to the jewelry company, hoping to pick up where her last collection had left off.

“There’s nothing for you here anymore,” the receptionist told her, not unkindly. “The company that carried your line went under. We can’t take on new designers right now.”

Tania walked home in a daze, her last real source of income gone with barely a sentence of explanation.

Her phone buzzed as she reached her door. A message from the old manager.

Don’t give up yet. Call me.

 

• • •

 

Mr. Carlson picked up on the first ring.

“My brother runs a jewelry store two cities over,” he said. “Bigger operation than the one you were working with. Your talent shouldn’t go to waste over one company folding.”

“I don’t even have a phone he can reach me on,” Tania admitted.

“Then get one. Today, if you can. I’ll set up the introduction.”

Tania hung up and started packing before she could talk herself out of it. She was halfway through folding a second shirt when she heard the front door open downstairs.

Caleb. Home early.

She grabbed her bag, ready to slip out the back, when a low groan stopped her at the top of the stairs.

She looked down through the railing. Caleb stood in the entryway, his face twisted, his bad arm swollen well past the size it had been that morning.

Tania set her bag down without thinking twice.

She took his phone from his jacket pocket and dialed the orthopedic doctor herself, ignoring his weak protest that he didn’t need help.

“Someone will be here in twenty minutes,” she told him, once she’d hung up.

Then she picked her bag back up.

“Don’t look for me,” she said. “I’ll come back on my own.”

She slipped his phone into a kitchen drawer on her way out, and didn’t look back once, even when she heard him shouting her name from the doorway behind her.

 

• • •

 

Cecile’s salon smelled like it always had, the same mix of hairspray and coffee that used to mean lazy Saturday afternoons back in college.

“Finally,” Cecile said, spinning Tania’s chair toward the mirror once she finished. “You look like yourself again.”

Tania barely recognized her own reflection. It had been months since she’d looked this rested, even if the rest was only skin deep.

At the airport a few hours later, someone bumped into her shoulder hard enough to nearly knock her off balance. By the time she turned around, the man was already gone, swallowed into the crowd.

A folded piece of paper sat in her hand.

Stay away from Mr. Wilson, or lose your life.

Tania tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the nearest trash can, her hands steadier than she expected. She boarded the plane without looking back.

The moment she landed, she bought a new phone and dialed the detective’s number from memory.

“Mrs. Wilson.” His voice had an edge to it she hadn’t heard before. “You need to see something. In person. Can you meet today?”

 

• • •

 

Tania skipped the jewelry store entirely and went straight to meet the detective at a small café near the train station.

He slid a folder across the table without a word.

Photos. Old, grainy, clearly taken from a distance. Her mother, younger than Tania had ever seen her, standing close to a man whose back was turned to the camera in every single shot.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Built exactly like someone else she knew.

“Is that—” Her voice caught. “Is that Caleb’s father?”

“We can’t confirm that yet,” the detective said carefully. “Don’t jump to conclusions. I need more before I put a name to him.”

Tania stared at the photos long after he’d packed them away, something cracking quietly in the story she’d told herself about her mother for twenty years.

She went to the jewelry store afterward, hollowed out, only to be told she’d need a lawyer present to finalize any contract.

She was still standing there, out of options and out of energy, when a familiar voice spoke up behind her.

“Need a lawyer?”

Norman.

 

• • •

 

“You didn’t have to do that,” Tania said, once the contract was signed and the store staff had gone back to their work.

“I wanted to.” Norman shrugged. “Let me be useful for once.”

Tania spent the next five days settling in, learning the layout of the new store, the names of the staff, the rhythm of a life that felt, for the first time in a long while, entirely her own.

Cecile flew in twice that week just to see her, and Norman was there both times, hovering just close enough to Cecile that Tania started to notice.

“We’re dating,” Cecile finally admitted on the second visit, practically glowing. “I know how it looks, Tania. I know his history. But he’s different with me.”

Tania set her coffee down slowly. “Cecile. Be careful with him.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Tania wasn’t so sure. But she let it go, for now.