The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 127

Chapter 114:New Beginning-2

Bella looked at me for a long moment. “Tell me,”

I started the only way I knew how, with the plainest version of the truth.

Claim

“Her name is Diana. She’s thirty-six, four years older than me.” I turned the coffee cup slowly in my hands.

Bella didn’t move as the city hummed below us, patient and indifferent.

“She’d pushed back on my father once too often. That was the official version – she was difficult, she was ungrateful. What she actually did was try to call the police, my father had broken her wrist, and she called from a payphone two blocks from the house, and someone on his staff intercepted it before anyone responded.”

“God,” Bella said quietly.

“He shipped her to an aunt in Edinburgh who wanted money more than she wanted a teenage girl. I don’t know everything that happened there. I know it wasn’t good.” I set my cup down. “I know she ran at eighteen and didn’t contact us – didn’t contact me – and I spent years telling myself she’d chosen to disappear because that was easier than the alternative.”

“That she’d been failed so completely she stopped expecting anything else.”

I looked at her. “Yes.”

I’d rehearsed this in my head a dozen different ways over the past few weeks – and none of it had felt right.

“A private investigator named Hendricks found her about two years ago. That was my grandmother’s doing originally – she hired him quietly in her final years without telling me. She wanted to know Diana was alive. She never stopped thinking about her.” I paused. “Hendricks tracked her to Oslo, then Lisbon, then a small city in northern Spain. No contact or confirmation she existed.”

“And you inherited the file.”

“Along with the question of what to do with it.” I exhaled. “She reached out a few weeks ago. The day Margret showed up at the daycare – she called while you were still on the line with sepurity.”

Bella’s expression shifted slightly. “You think the timing was deliberate?”

“I’ve been asking myself that every day since.” I turned toward her. “She said she’d been following the SEC allegations. Said she’d seen my name in the coverage and wanted to understand what kind of man I’d become before she decided whether to come home. Those were her exact words.”

“That’s a careful way to put it.”

“She’s careful. The investigator’s file is thorough – she built a small architecture firm over the last decade, two business partners, no family of record, no long-term relationships Hendricks could document. She’s done well mostly on her own.” I paused. “She has every reason to be angry, Bella. At my father, who is dead and out of reach. Which means years of that anger has had nowhere to be redirected.”

“Except on you.”

< Chapter 114-New Beginning 2

Claim

didn’t find her. I didn’t try hard enough, or soon enough, or at all until grandma forced the question.” I said it plainly, because dressing it up would have been worse. “I spent my adult life building a version of myself that would have disgusted her, and I can’t undo that. I can only be a different answer when she looks at me now.”

Bella was quiet for a long moment, her eyes on the skyline. Then she turned to me. “What do you want from a relationship with her?”

It was the most direct version of the question, and I’d spent weeks circling it.

“I want to know her,” I said. “Whatever’s left to know. I want Tom to have family that isn’t poisoned.” I held Bella’s gaze. “And I wanted to tell you everything before it becomes something that arrives when you’re not ready for it. I’ve done that to you before – let things surface instead of saying them. I won’t do it again.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify