SHE WAS HIRED TO COMFORT A DYING MAFIA BOSS—THEN A STRAY CAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
Chapter 7: The Notebook Disturbed
Someone searched her room while she read in the library that night — her notebook moved, her water glass refilled with something faintly, wrongly herbal. Fear, real and cold, rose in her for the first time since arriving. She poured the water down the drain and never drank anything she hadn’t drawn herself again.
Exhausted, she overslept the next morning for the first time since arriving — and returned to find Oscar back in charge of every meal, Elias eating bacon and eggs in cold silence, the door that had once been left open for her now shut tight. Four days passed with barely a word between them, and Celeste watched the progress of two weeks unravel in front of her — the tremor returning to his hands, the color leaving his face.
On the fourth night, she went to check on him anyway and found him curled on the floor between the bed and the window, sweating, convulsing, groaning through clenched teeth that this time he was really dying.
She got herbal tea into him, dragged him back to bed with the last of her strength, and when she tried to rise for the chair, his hand caught her wrist — desperate, drowning. “Stay here. I’m afraid that if I close my eyes now, I won’t wake up again.”
He called her Celeste for the first time that night — not Miss Harlow — and told her, stripped of every wall he owned, that he was afraid to die. She held his face in her hands, and when he drew her close and kissed her, trembling, tasting of salt neither of them could name, she didn’t pull away.
She stayed the whole night. And when her hand brushed the back of his neck as he finally slept, she felt it: hundreds of short new hairs pushing through skin that had been bare for months. Hair the doctors had sworn would never return.
She pulled her notebook from her coat and, in the moonlight, saw the pattern she’d been circling for two weeks arrive with total, undeniable clarity. On the days she cooked, every symptom fell. On the days Oscar cooked, every symptom rose. Not one exception.