3. Mine Alone

3. Mine Alone

Tania was up before dawn, moving quietly through the kitchen while the rest of the house still slept. Cooking had always calmed her, ever since she was a teenager helping her uncle in his little shop, and this morning she needed the calm more than usual.

She found herself making Gabe’s favorite, the dish she used to bring to his dorm room back in college when he was too broke and too proud to admit he was surviving on ramen. Her phone buzzed as she plated it. A text from Gabe.

I know this is weird to say from a hospital bed, but I keep thinking about that dish you used to make. Probably the medication talking.

She smiled despite herself, and after a long moment of hesitation, wrapped a portion in foil and handed it to Denise, the housemaid, along with strict instructions.

“Please, just make sure Caleb doesn’t find out about this.”

Denise nodded, though her eyes were wary. Everyone in this house had learned to be wary.

Caleb came home earlier than expected and caught Denise slipping out with the container, his gaze narrowing with immediate suspicion. “What is that? Where are you taking it?”

Before Denise could stammer out an answer, his phone rang. Sophia’s name lit up the screen, and whatever interest he’d had in interrogating the housemaid evaporated instantly.

“Caleb, it’s Sia,” Sophia said the moment he picked up, her voice thin with practiced panic. “Her fever won’t break. I don’t know what to do.”

He was out the door within minutes, leaving Denise standing frozen in the hallway, the forgotten container still in her hands.

Caleb didn’t come home that night. He stayed at Sophia’s penthouse, coaxing a feverish baby to sleep while Sophia hovered nearby, insisting he stay just a little longer, just until Sia settled.

Back at the estate, Tania’s own illness chose that same night to flare, a crushing tightness in her chest that left her gasping against her pillow. She called him with what strength she had left.

“Caleb, I’m sick. I need you to come home.”

“That is a lame excuse,” he said, distracted, Sia’s crying audible in the background. “I’m busy, Tania.”

The line went dead before she could argue. Tania lay alone in the dark, her heart stuttering painfully in her chest, and eventually the world tilted sideways and went black.

She woke hours later, still on the bedroom floor where she’d collapsed, her whole body aching. Her first thought was of her uncle. She needed to get to the hospital, needed to see him, needed to know if he’d shown any sign of waking from the coma.

But Caleb had left guards posted at every exit, and none of them would let her past the gate without his permission.

Determined not to let him find out how close she’d come to dying alone on their bedroom floor, Tania picked up her phone with trembling hands and called the only person who never asked too many questions.

“Cecile,” she whispered when her friend answered. “I need your help.”

 

• • •

 

Caleb sat behind his desk that afternoon, staring at nothing, his mind circling back to Tania despite every effort to focus on the contracts in front of him.

His phone rang. Nicole had been in a car accident.

He was at the hospital within the hour, weaving quickly through the corridors toward the VIP ward, when a familiar silhouette near the cardiology department stopped him cold. The shape of her shoulders, the particular way she held herself when she was in pain.

It couldn’t be her. Tania was home. He’d made sure of that.

He shook the thought off and continued to Nicole’s room, where he lay propped up against a mountain of pillows, one arm in a cast, looking more annoyed than injured.

“About time you showed up,” he said dryly. “Can I ask you something, Caleb? When exactly are you planning to tell Sophia the truth?”

“Drop it, Nicole.”

“I’m serious. This can’t go on forever.”

He didn’t answer, already pulling out his phone to call the new security guard stationed at the estate, his mind still snagged on that silhouette.

“Is Tania home?” he asked the moment the guard picked up.

“Yes, sir. She’s upstairs resting.”

It should have been reassuring. Instead, something itched at the back of his mind, refusing to settle, and when he stepped outside toward the parking lot a few minutes later, he nearly collided with a woman in a baseball cap and oversized sunglasses hurrying toward a waiting car.

He caught her wrist before she could slip past him. “Cecile?”

The cap fell back as she twisted away, and it wasn’t Cecile’s face staring back at him in wide-eyed panic.

It was Tania’s.

“You lied to me,” he said, low and furious. “Your own guard lied to me. You’re here to see him, aren’t you? Gabe?”

“I came to see my uncle, Caleb. He’s in a coma. Not that you’d care.”

He didn’t believe her, or didn’t want to, dragging her back to his car and then back to the estate, exhausting her with a relentless barrage of accusations the entire drive. By the time they arrived, Tania had no strength left to argue.

“Go near him again,” Caleb warned, gripping her chin, “and I’ll kill him myself. Do you understand me?”

She didn’t answer. She simply turned away and climbed into bed, too tired to fight anymore.

Later that night, unable to sleep, she curled toward him in the dark and murmured words she never would have said if she thought he was awake to hear them.

“If I die, Caleb, will you still hate me? Will you regret ever betraying our love and treating me like trash?”

Silence answered her, heavy and complete. She closed her eyes, certain he was asleep.

But in his sleep, Caleb’s arm tightened around her, pulling her closer, and he murmured four words into her hair that he would never remember saying, and that she would never quite believe she’d heard.

“Tania, I love you.”

 

• • •

 

Tania woke to an empty bed the next morning, Caleb’s side already cold.

She lay there for a long while, replaying his sleepy murmur from the night before, turning the words over like she could wring more truth out of them if she just tried hard enough. Was there hope for them after all? Had some small part of the man who saved her from a fire two years ago survived under all that cruelty?

Then she laughed, bitter and quiet, at her own foolishness. “Caleb doesn’t love me anymore. He has Sophia and his lovely daughter. Why should there be any hope for us?”

It had been a month since her diagnosis. Five months left, according to Dr. Jeff’s last calculations, assuming her heart didn’t give out sooner under the strain Caleb kept putting it through.

Her phone rang. The detective, with an update that only deepened the mystery instead of solving it.

“There was a woman named Cody who appeared in Caleb’s father’s life around the right time period,” he told her. “She matches the general description in the old rumors. But Mrs. Wilson, your mother’s name was Carla, not Cody. I don’t think they’re the same person.”

Tania sat with that for a long moment, more confused than ever. If it wasn’t her mother, then why had Caleb been so certain? Why had his diary named her the enemy’s daughter?

She decided then that she needed to go back to her father’s hometown herself, to the small town of Millbrook where she’d been born before her mother vanished and her father moved them both to the city to escape the memories. Her mother’s only living relative had been her uncle, and he was lying in a hospital bed unable to answer a single question.

But Caleb had tightened security around the estate to the point of suffocation, and he hadn’t come home in days, as though avoiding her entirely had become easier than facing whatever guilt gnawed at him.

An invitation arrived a few days later for a college reunion, and on a whim, Tania asked her assigned bodyguards if they’d take her. To her surprise, after a hushed phone call she wasn’t meant to overhear, they agreed.

Gabe was already there when she arrived, having saved her a seat near the front, his smile lighting up the moment he spotted her.

Then Caleb walked in, invited by one of their old professors, and Tania’s stomach dropped straight to the floor.

Desperate to protect Gabe from whatever retaliation Caleb might dream up, Tania did the only thing she could think of. She rejected him, loudly, publicly, cruelly enough that the whole room turned to stare, cruelly enough that she saw the hurt bloom across Gabe’s face before she made herself look away.

The car ride home with Caleb afterward was suffocatingly silent. Then, without warning, he told the driver to stop, hauled her out onto the shoulder of the road, and turned the car back the way they’d come.

Tania barely had time to process what was happening before she saw it. Gabe’s car, further down the highway, and Caleb’s Bugatti slamming into the side of it at full speed, metal shrieking against metal.

She screamed and ran, her damaged heart hammering against her ribs as she scrambled toward the wreckage.

Caleb stepped out of his own car, seemingly unhurt, and closed the distance between them before she could reach Gabe. He gripped her chin, forcing her eyes to his, something possessive and unhinged burning in his gaze.

“You are mine, Tania,” he said. “Mine alone.”

 

• • •

 

Caleb dragged her back to the estate that night, and Tania went without a fight, her body limp, her eyes fixed on nothing. Mistaking her silence for grief over Gabe, Caleb only grew more irritated with every passing hour.

He was halfway out the door again, his phone buzzing with Sophia’s name for the third time that evening, when a loud crash echoed from the kitchen.

He found Tania crumpled on the floor amid shattered glass, completely unresponsive.

Something in him finally broke through. He scooped her up without a second thought and drove her to the hospital himself, running every red light between the estate and the emergency room doors.

But by the time Tania opened her eyes in the hospital bed hours later, whatever had cracked open in him had sealed shut again, replaced by something colder and crueler than before.

“Your acting has really improved,” he said, arms crossed, standing at the foot of her bed like a stranger. “Would you go to this extent just to gain my sympathy?”

Tania stared at the ceiling, too exhausted to even feel the sting of his words anymore.

“You’re the daughter of a murderer,” he continued, voice flat and merciless. “A home wrecker. You don’t deserve a bit of sympathy from me.”

“Then let’s just proceed with the divorce,” she said quietly, not bothering to fight him on the accusation anymore. “When love turns to hatred, the only option left is to separate. You’re only hurting yourself by keeping me around, Caleb. Let’s finalize the divorce, and we can both find happiness somewhere else.”

“You don’t deserve happiness,” he said, leaning down close enough that she could feel his breath against her cheek. “As long as I’m alive, I’ll make sure you live every single day of it in torture.”

Before she could respond, he reached over and yanked the IV line straight out of her arm, ignoring her wince of pain, and half-dragged her out of the hospital against every protest from the nurses trailing behind them.

He didn’t take her home. He went to Sophia instead, and didn’t return until well past midnight, the smell of whiskey thick on his breath, his steps unsteady as he found his way to their bedroom.

Tania was still awake, staring at the ceiling, when he collapsed onto the bed beside her and pulled her against his chest with surprising gentleness.

“Do you know how much it hurts?” he murmured into her hair, his voice cracking in a way it never did while sober. “I love you, Nia, and I hate that I do.”

Tania lay frozen in his arms, unsure if the man holding her right now had any idea who he was talking to, unsure if he’d even remember saying it come morning.

 

• • •

 

Caleb woke before dawn and immediately threw up in the bathroom, the whiskey from the night before finally catching up with him. Tania cleaned up after him without a word, then sat on the edge of the bed studying his pale, exhausted face while he slept off the rest of it.

It was strange, she thought, how easily she could still fall into the shape of loving him, even now. Even after everything.

Her mind drifted back to the night he’d proposed, down on one knee in the same hospital garden where she’d spent weeks recovering from the fire that almost killed her, his hands shaking as he told her he’d never been more certain of anything in his life. She remembered the easy years that followed, the way he used to trace idle patterns on her wrist while they watched movies, the sound of his laugh before grief had hollowed it out completely.

She leaned down and pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his forehead.

“I hate you too, Caleb,” she whispered against his skin, “and it hurts. Once I’m gone, will you ever miss me?”

The detective’s call woke her the next morning.

“Something strange is happening on my end,” he told her, his voice tight with frustration. “Every time I get close to your mother’s past before she disappeared, the trail goes cold. Records go missing. Witnesses stop returning my calls. Someone with real influence is blocking this investigation, Mrs. Wilson.”

Tania hung up feeling more unsettled than before, and turned to find Caleb standing in the bedroom doorway, watching her with an unreadable expression. He seemed to remember pieces of the night before, the tenderness, the confession, but doubt clouded his features like he wasn’t sure he trusted his own memory.

He said nothing about it. Instead, he crossed to the closet, pulled out a set of black clothes, and tossed them onto the bed in front of her.

“We’re going out.”

He wouldn’t tell her where, not until they pulled up outside the gates of an amusement park, dark and empty in the early morning light. Tania recognized it instantly. He’d built this for her, years ago, a private little world of carousel horses and cotton candy stands, a promise made in the dark of a hospital garden about the life they’d build together.

She watched in growing horror as Caleb stalked through the gates and began systematically destroying it. Toppling carnival games. Smashing string lights. Tearing down the banners that still bore both their names.

“Caleb, stop! Please!” She grabbed at his arm, but he didn’t so much as flinch, shaking her off like she weighed nothing.

“Be grateful,” he said coldly, not even looking at her, “that I picked out appropriate clothes for you before we came. Aren’t you grateful that I’m letting you mourn?”

He left her standing alone amid the wreckage of every promise he’d ever made her, climbing back into his car without a backward glance, his own memories of building this place for her locked somewhere he refused to visit anymore.

Tania sank down onto the shattered remains of a carousel horse and let herself cry, really cry, for the first time in weeks. She cried for the park. For the marriage. For the six months, now closer to five, that she had left to live.

By the time she finally stood and wiped her face, something in her had hardened into resolve.

She was done waiting for answers to come to her.

She was going to Millbrook herself.