The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 130

Chapter 117: Seeds of Doubt

Bella POV

I didn’t tell Caleb what Diana said. I told myself it was because I wasn’t sure what it meant yet – whether it was a genuine warning from a damaged woman who’d learned hard lessons about Black men, or something more deliberate than that.

I needed more information before I turned it into a conversation, and turning it into a conversation before I understood it would only upset Caleb and cloud whatever instinct I was trying to follow.

That was what I told myself. The part I didn’t examine too closely was that the words had landed somewhere tender, in the place where my old fears lived, and some small traitorous part of me was already thinking about it.

He’ll disappoint you eventually. They all do.

Diana had said it like a kindness. That was the thing I couldn’t shake.

She started joining us for dinner twice a week. Caleb had suggested it, careful and hopeful in the way he got when something mattered to him, and I’d agreed because objecting would have required me to explain why, and I hadn’t been ready to do that. So Diana came, and she was good with Tom – not warm exactly, more curious, watching him with an attention that Tom found interesting rather than unsettling — and she and Caleb rebuilt something careful and tentative between them, and I sat at the end of the table and smiled and said the right things and tried to figure out what I was actually seeing.

But doubts arrived, small ones at first. A comment about a business trip Caleb hadn’t mentioned until the day before.

A name I didn’t recognize in a call he took privately and didn’t explain afterward. Things that in isolation meant nothing – Caleb had always had the densely scheduled, compartmentalized professional life of someone who’d been operating alone for years, and decoding all of it in real time wasn’t reasonable. I knew that.

But Diana had planted something, and now I was looking for evidence to confirm it, which was its own kind of poison.

On Thursday I left the office early to pick Tom up from his swimming lesson. Caleb was supposed to be in a budget review until six, so I wasn’t expecting to see his car when I cut through the Kessler Street car park on my way back to the main road.

But there it was – his black SUV, unmistakable, parked near the exit.

And Caleb, standing beside it, talking to a woman I didn’t recognize.

She was young, put-together, dark hair pulled back, and she had her hand on his arm in the easy, familiar way of someone who touched him without thinking about it. Caleb was leaning slightly toward her, his posture attentive, and whatever they were discussing was serious enough that neither of them noticed me on the far side of the car park.

Tom tugged my hand. “Mummy, my bag’s getting heavy.”

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<Chapter 17-Seeds of Doubt

“One second, baby.” I shifted his swim bag to my shoulder and kept watching.

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The woman said something that made Caleb nod. He put his hand briefly over hers on his arm – a reassuring gesture, quick and unconscious and then she stepped back and he reached into his jacket for something. An envelope. He handed it to her, she took it, and then they went their separate ways. Caleb got back into the SUV without looking up.

I stood in the car park with Tom’s damp swimming bag digging into my shoulder and told myself it was nothing. A staff member. A business associate. A completely ordinary interaction that would have a completely ordinary explanation if I just asked.

Diana’s voice settled quietly into my head. He’ll disappoint you eventually.

“Mummy.” Tom looked up at me. “Why do you look like that?”

“Like what?” I said, keeping my voice even.

“Like when your work goes wrong,” he said, with the devastating accuracy of a four-year-old, and I squeezed his hand and started walking.

By the time I reached the penthouse I had talked myself into asking directly, because I was not a woman who sat on questions and corroded. I had also talked myself into not asking yet, because I needed to be calm when I did, and right now I was not calm.

What I was, I admitted quietly and without much comfort, was afraid.

Not of Caleb. Of myself – of how fast the old fear had moved when Diana gave it something to hold onto. Of how quickly I’d gone from watching a twenty-second interaction in a car park to building a case against a man who had spent months doing everything right.

I put Tom in the bath and sat on the bathroom floor while he narrated an elaborate submarine battle, and I pressed my back against the cool tiles and thought about what it meant that one woman’s carefully delivered warning had been enough to make me start doubting everything.

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