Chapter 76 Before She Was Born
Bella’s POV
I lay awake for a long time after Rhys left the room.
Not because I was afraid. Not quite. It was more like when you look at something you’ve seen a hundred times and suddenly see a different shape inside it that you can’t unsee.
I kept coming back to one thing.
They started preparing for Moonstone long before Ronan.
Eleven years ago was Ronan’s recruitment. So before Ronan meant before that. Fifteen years. Twenty. Maybe more.
And Foss had been part of it for twenty years.
Which meant this network — whatever it was, had been watching Moonstone before I was born.
I sat up.
I couldn’t sleep. That was clear by two in the morning, so I stopped trying.
I went to my desk, turned on the small lamp, and opened the notebook where I had been writing the things I didn’t understand yet.
I looked at the silver spiral.
Then I started writing something different. Not what I knew. What I remembered.
My mother died when I was six. Heart complications, triggered by severe grief. That was what everyone said. My father’s affair destroyed her.
I wrote that down.
Then I wrote underneath it: Why did the affair happen when it did?
My father had met Pat years before the affair became public. He had been a junior municipal official when they met. His rise to mayor had been — I had always assumed, the result of his own talent and Pat’s family connections, which were significant.
I wrote: What helped his career advance?
Then: Timing.
I stared at that word for a moment.
I had been three when his career shifted upward. Six when the affair was exposed and my mother died.
My father’s career changed. My mother died. The family fell apart.
All of it happened within a surprisingly short number of years.
I wrote; Coincidence? If not by coincidence… Then what?
I put the pen down.
That thought was too large for the middle of the night. I was aware of that. It was the kind of thought that could run away with you if you let it, and I had learned — slowly, over months in this pack, that running away with thoughts at two in the morning produced very little except a worse morning.
So I wrote it down and I put a box around it and I did not try to reach a conclusion.
I wrote: My mother may have known something. Then: Or she may have been in someone’s way.
Both of those were different from my mother was killed. They were also different from it was random.
They sat in the middle, where the truth usually lived.
I heard the door about twenty minutes later — very quiet, the sound of someone trying not to make noise. I looked up.
Rhys was standing in the doorway in the dark.
He looked at me at the desk. Looked at the lamp. Looked at the notebook.
He didn’t say anything. He just came in, moved the chair from near the wardrobe to a position a few feet from the desk, and sat down.
He didn’t ask what I was writing.
I looked at him for a moment.
“You didn’t have to come back,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
I looked at the notebook. “I’m going in circles.”
“That’s allowed.”
“It’s really not productive.”
“Also allowed, you know.”
I looked at him again. He was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his hands loose, watching me without any expectation in his face. Just… present. In the way he was present when he had decided to be somewhere.
I turned the notebook toward him slightly. Not all of it. Just the box I had drawn around the question.
My mother may have known something.
He read it. Looked up.
“What makes you think that?” he said. Quietly. Not pressuring…genuinely asking.
“Nothing specific,” I said. “Just a feeling.” I paused. “My father’s career moved in a very particular direction at a very particular time. And then things fell apart at a very particular time.” I looked at my hands. “I was very young. I don’t know what was happening around me. I just know the shape of it.”
“The shape,” he repeated.
“Like something was arranged.” I looked up. “And I don’t know if I’m seeing that because it’s there or because Foss’s conversation tonight has me looking for patterns that aren’t…”
“You’ve been finding patterns accurately for months,” he said.
I stopped. “That doesn’t mean every pattern is real.”
“I know you've earned the right to trust your instincts,” he said. “ You’re not someone who invents patterns.” He held my gaze. “If the shape looks arranged, it’s worth asking why.”
I looked at the notebook.
After a while, I turned off the lamp and went back to bed. I didn’t ask him to stay. He stayed anyway, in the chair, and when I woke up at dawn he was still there with his head resting back against the wall and his eyes closed.
I sat up quietly.
He heard me anyway, I was beginning to think that was just how he operated—and opened his eyes.
“I need to know who my mother really was,” I said. Not planned. Just what came out.
He looked at me for a moment.
“We will,” he said.
Dawn had turned the curtains pale by the time I realized neither of us had slept.