Chapter 65

Chapter 65


Alejandro’s POV

Reeves had contacted me some days later but no restaurant this time. He came to the office, which told me what he had was either too sensitive for a public space or too heavy to carry around longer than necessary.

He sat across from my desk in the same grey jacket, same quiet energy, same untouched water, and placed a smaller envelope than last time between us.

“Medical records,” he said.

I didn’t touch it immediately.

“How complete?” I asked.

“Complete enough,” he replied carefully. “I had to go through three different channels to get what’s in there. Her doctor runs an exceptionally tight operation, which tells you something about how seriously he’s taking her case.”

“What kind of case,” I said flatly, even though the word cardiology had been sitting in my chest like a stone for two weeks.

Reeves looked at me with the measured expression of a man who delivered difficult information regularly and had learned that the cleanest way was always the most direct.

“Restrictive cardiomyopathy,” he said.

The office went very quiet.

“Explain it to me,” I replied.

“It’s a condition where the heart muscle becomes rigid,” he began, his voice low and even. “It stops filling with blood the way it should between beats. Over time it gets progressively worse.” He paused briefly. “It’s rare. Particularly in someone her age.”

I kept my face completely still.

“Treatment options?” I pressed.

“Surgery is the primary intervention at the stage she’s at,” he answered. “But from what I was able to gather, she’s been avoiding committing to it. She’s been managing symptoms and buying herself time through medication but her last three appointments suggest the window for effective surgical intervention is getting significantly smaller.”

I stared at the envelope.

“How small?” I asked quietly.

Reeves hesitated for the first time since I’d known him, which was its own kind of answer.

“Small enough that her doctor escalated the urgency classification at her last visit,” he replied carefully.

I nodded once, slowly, the way you nodded when your brain was processing something in the background that your face wasn’t ready to show yet.

“That’s everything?” I asked.

“That’s the medical portion,” he confirmed. “There’s something else in there. Separate page at the back.”

I finally picked up the envelope and opened it, pulling out the pages and turning to the last one.

It was a financial record.

Her bank statements going back eight months, and I didn’t need to study them long to understand what I was looking at. 

The deposits from my father’s company, her salary, leaving almost immediately after arriving. Medical bills swallowing nearly everything. A payment plan to the hospital that she was maintaining barely, month by month, with nothing comfortable on either side of it.

She had been paying for her own treatment.

Alone. While working for us. While standing in my kitchen making tea and arguing with me about professionalism and carrying all of this inside her chest without a single word of it showing on her face.

I put the pages down on the desk.

Reeves watched me without comment, which I appreciated.

“Thank you,” I said eventually. “That’s all I need.”

He stood, buttoned his jacket, and left the same way he always did, quietly and completely, like he’d never been there.

I sat alone in my office for a long time after he’d gone.

The financial records sat on my desk facing upward and I looked at them without really seeing them anymore because my brain had stopped processing new information and was instead doing something else entirely with what it already had.

She had stood in my kitchen on her first day, dropped her bag, was embarrassed about the sex toys that fell out of it and made a joke about professionalism, looking at me with those careful eyes that gave away less than she thought they did.

She had done all of that while carrying a failing heart and a hospital payment plan and a secret that could have ended everything at any point.

I thought about the night she’d said no to the ring.

There are things you don’t know about me. Things I should have told you earlier.

I thought about the specific look on her face when she’d said it, not evasive, something more like someone standing at the edge of something they weren’t sure they’d survive jumping into.

She hadn’t been protecting herself from me. She’d been protecting me from this.

From sitting exactly where I was sitting right now with these papers on my desk and this specific weight in my chest that felt nothing like any of the things I’d felt before in my life and everything like the thing I’d been avoiding naming for months.

I pulled out my phone, opened her contact and stared at it.

Three missed calls from her two weeks ago. Nothing since, because Mira Martinez had too much pride to chase anyone who didn’t come when they were supposed to, which was one of the things I loved about her and one of the things making this specific moment significantly harder.

I locked the phone without calling.

Not yet.

I needed to find Flora first. That was the next piece. The piece that changed everything about what Mira thought she knew about herself, her history and how alone she actually was in all of this.

I opened my laptop and pulled up the information Reeves had given me about Millhaven and Flora Reyes.

A woman who went to community events under a borrowed name and didn’t know she had a daughter who thought she was dead and was currently paying her own medical bills alone in a city that didn’t know what it had.

I started typing.

Marlo appeared in my office doorway sometime later, knocking on the open door with his knuckle.

“You missed the two o’clock,” he remarked, studying my face with that quiet attention of his.

“Reschedule it,” I replied without looking up.

He stayed in the doorway.

“You okay?” he asked.

I looked up at him then, and whatever he saw in my expression made him straighten slightly.

“What happened?” he pressed.

“Nothing I can talk about yet,” I replied honestly.

He nodded slowly, accepting that the way he always accepted things he couldn’t immediately fix, with a patience that I didn’t tell him nearly enough that I was grateful for.

“Okay,” he said simply. “I’ll reschedule.”

He turned to leave.

“Marlo,” I called after him.

He looked back.

“How is she?” I asked. “From what you hear?”

He knew immediately who I meant. He always did.

Something moved through his expression, carefully.

“She went out yesterday,” he answered quietly. “With Ace.”

I looked back at my laptop screen.

“Good,” I replied, and meant none of it. 

So he had finally resurfaced? And now pursuing Mira because I’m not there. 

“Dro,” Marlo started.

“Reschedule the two o’clock,” I said evenly. “Please.”

He held the doorway for another second.Then he left without pushing it further.

I stared at the name on my screen.

Flora Reyes. Millhaven. I was going to find her no matter what.