Chapter 6 - The Man Who Came Back
That night, I sat in Dante’s library with a cup of tea I wasn’t drinking and finally asked the question I had been avoiding since the clinic.
“Why didn’t you come back?”
He didn’t look offended.
He looked tired.
“Three days after I left New York, there was a federal inquiry tied to one of our foreign shipping lanes,” he said. “Not about me personally, but bad enough that every communication channel got scrubbed and replaced. My old number was shut down. I spent weeks moving between London, Rotterdam, and Singapore.”
“And my letters?”
He exhaled slowly. “Never reached me.”
Victor, who was sitting near the fireplace reviewing a memo, spoke up then.
“We found two written inquiries in the company archive,” he said. “Both were routed to a general mailbox and marked closed by an assistant who no longer works there.”
Dante’s eyes darkened. “I didn’t know that until yesterday.”
Part of me wanted to stay angry.
Another part was too tired to perform anger for the sake of pride.
“You searched for me?”
“Yes.”
“How hard?”
The answer came without hesitation.
“I had someone locate the hospital where you worked when the number failed. You had already transferred units. By the time I found an old address, you’d moved.”
It was the truth that convinced me—not because it was dramatic, but because it was imperfect. Real efforts usually are.
Then he asked the question I should have expected.
“Will you let me be involved?”
I looked down at my hands over my stomach.
“I don’t know what involved means yet.”
“That’s fair.”
He didn’t ask for more than I could give.
Instead, he said, “Then let’s start with one thing. I’m not going anywhere this time.”
For a woman who had been publicly discarded and privately defrauded in the same year, that sentence should have sounded like a promise.
Instead, it sounded like a test.
So I nodded once and said, “Then prove it.”
He did not smile.
He just said, “All right.”
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And the next morning, he showed up at Nora’s office at 8:15 with coffee, updated due-diligence summaries, and a willingness to wait while the legal people spoke first.
That, more than anything, was how I began believing him.
