Chapter 121 End of Natalie

Chapter 121 End of Natalie
Nora’s POV 

The silence stretched long enough that the woman detective lowered her pen slightly. Not giving up on the question. Just giving me room.

The man hadn’t moved. Still with his hands loose in his jacket pockets, watching my face with the particular attention of someone who had learned that what a person did in silence was often more informative than what they said.

I looked at my hands, and after a difficult thought, I looked up.

“Yes,” I said.

The woman’s pen came back up.

“There is someone,” I said. “Her name is Natalie Reeves.”

Once I started talking it came out with a clarity that surprised me.

Not easily. Clarity and ease were different things. It wasn’t easy to sit and dismantle someone whose hands had held me together for five years. But it was clear. The path through it was clear and I followed it.

I told them about Natalie.

Not all of it, not the five years, or the plan, or the confession in this same room less than an hour ago. Just what they needed and what sounds relevant to what had happened in the apartment today.

The visit two nights ago. Finding her on the sofa when we came home. The question of how she had gotten in. The threat at the doorway — wait for it — and what that had meant coming from Natalie specifically, from someone I knew well enough to know that patience was her most reliable quality.

The woman wrote steadily while the man asked occasional questions. Precise ones. The kind that filled specific gaps rather than asking me to repeat things I had already said.

“She came here tonight,” I said. “To this room. After Alexa was in surgery.”

The woman looked up.

“She came to the hospital,” I said. “She was here less than an hour ago. Standing where you’re sitting.” I looked at the space the man occupied. “She confirmed it. Not explicitly…she didn’t say the words I did this. But she said Alexa deserved it. She said she had lifted a curse.” I paused. “From someone who knew Natalie, that was a confirmation.”

“You said she came here to talk to you,” the man said. “What did she want?”

I thought about how to answer that.

“She said she loves me and wanted me to leave with her,” I said. “She has resources. She said she could disappear, and she wanted me to go with her.”

“What did you tell her?”

“No,” I said. “I told her no and I told her to leave.”

“And she left willingly?”

“She left,” I said. “She told me to think about it. That she’d give me time to sit with it.” I looked at the curtain. “She’ll come back. That’s who she is. She said she’d give me time and then come back for the answer.”

The two detectives looked at each other.

Something passed between them that had the quality of a rapid professional exchange, all the content compressed into a glance.

The woman looked back at me. “Ms. Martinez. If what you’re telling us is accurate, and we have no reason to doubt you, then we have an opportunity here.”

“Okay?” I said, waiting for her to explain what she meant.

“If she believes you’re still considering her proposal.”

“She’ll come back,” I said. “I know she’ll come back. Natalie doesn’t leave things unresolved. She’s too…” I stopped. “She is very thorough. She will come back.”

“Would you be willing,” the man said carefully, “to help us be ready for that?”

I looked at them both.

This time, without thinking much about the five years we spent, I answered.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell me what you need.”

They were methodical about it.

The plan was not complicated, the best ones rarely were. Natalie would come back. When she did the building would have two officers in plain clothes in the lobby and two more on the second floor corridor. I would be in the apartment. I would let her in, then give her no reason to believe anything had changed since she left the hospital.

When she was inside and had confirmed her involvement, the detectives were precise about this, they needed something on record, something she said herself, then they would come in.

“You understand what we’re asking,” the woman said. Not a question, just a check.

“I understand,” I said.

“If at any point you feel unsafe..”

“I’ve spent five years around Natalie Reeves,” I said. “I know how to read her. I’ll be fine.”

The man looked at me for a moment, assessing me. Then he nodded and they left.

I lay back on the narrow bed looking at the ceiling, thinking about what I had just done.

Natalie’s face when she walked out of this room. The last look she had given me, the one that had so much in it that I hadn’t been able to identify all of it in real time. Hope, maybe. The fragile specific hope of someone who had finally said the true thing and was waiting to see what the world did with it.

And what I did with that hope, handing it to the cops. Was that a betrayal?

I sat with the question.

And then I thought about Alexa upstairs.

No. It wasn’t a betrayal.

Natalie had made her choices. She chose violence and force, over calmness and acceptance. She needs to be held accountable. Whatever she felt for me… real or performed or somewhere in between… it had produced that. And I was not going to protect it.

The next morning they moved Alexa to a recovery room. I sat with her for an hour before the nurses asked me to let her rest. She was not fully conscious, somewhere in the managed half-sleep of post-surgery, surfacing occasionally and then going back under. Once, she opened her eyes, looked at me and said my name. I held her hand and told her I was there and she went back under. That was enough for now.

I went back to the apartment in the afternoon and the officers were already in position. I didn’t see them but I knew they were there. The man detective had texted a single word an hour earlier.

Ready. So I knew.

I unlocked the apartment and went in, made coffee and sat on the sofa waiting.

She came at four. I could heard the building door first, and then the lift, followed by her footsteps in the corridor with the even unhurried rhythm that was Natalie’s walk and nobody else’s.

She knocked this time around, and I opened after sone moments, so that it wouldn’t look like I was waiting for her..

She looked lighter than last night, or performing lighter. With Natalie it was sometimes difficult to tell which. She had slept somewhere, changed her clothes and assembled herself back into the composed version, the surface fully repaired.

“You didn’t call the police,” she said. By way of greeting.

“Come in,” I said.

She came in and looked around the apartment with an assessing eyes that took in details automatically. She looked at me on the sofa and sat in the chair across from it with the ease of someone who had decided this was going to go her way.

“Have you thought about it?” she said.

“I’ve thought about it,” I said.

“And?”

I looked at her.

She looked back at me with those eyes that had the hope I had identified too late and was not going to be able to give back to her in any form that didn’t break something.

“But why did you do that?” I asked, trying to make her comfortable and confirmed what she’d done.

“Nora, I am sorry if that hurt you. But Alexa needs to go. She kept on dragging you back no matter how much you’ve tried to move on.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but the door came open, caughting her off guard.

Four of them moved fast and with coordinated efficiency of people who had done this before. The man detective first, then the woman, then two in uniform behind them. Natalie was on her feet before they cleared the doorway. She looked at them, then back at me.

The hope drained out of her face.

What replaced it was something I had never seen on Natalie before. Not the cold composure or the calculated anger. It was something rawer and more animal than either of those. Something that had its teeth in it.

“Natalie Reeves.” The detective’s voice was clear and professionally flat. “You are under arrest for the attempted murder of Alexa Ashford. You have the right to remain silent…”

She wasn’t listening to him, she was looking at me.

They moved to either side of her and she let them take her arms without trying to resist. She’s probably deciding in real time how to respond and landing on a version of compliance that cost her the least dignity.

Then she found her voice.

“Traitor.” The word came out quiet first. Loud enough for only me to hear. Then louder as they moved her toward the door. “You absolute traitor.”

They pulled her into the corridor.

“Everything I did for you,” she said. Her voice was rising now, the composure gone fully, the thing underneath it loose and loud, aimed entirely at me. “Five years. Five years I gave you and you hand me to them for her.” She was in the corridor now, the officers moving her toward the lift, and her voice was carrying the full length of it. “She’s not worth it Nora. She will never be worth what you’ve just done.”

The lift doors opened.

“I will come for you.” Her voice ricocheted off the corridor walls. “Both of you. I promise you that. Whatever they do with me I will…”

The lift doors closed, cutting her voice off.

The corridor went silent. I stood in the doorway of the apartment and looked at the closed lift doors and breathed.

The woman detective appeared at my elbow.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I thought about the question, not knowing the appropriate word to answer her with.