A Missing Key 218 Missed Calls One Family Secret novel Chapter 24

hapter 12

Chapter 12

The day I left, Mom and Claire came to see me off at the airport.

Mom grabbed my hand, eyes brimming with tears.

“Nina… will you come visit more often? Please?”

I looked at her for a long moment, then asked the question that had been sitting in the back of my mind for years.

“Mom, if I hadn’t accomplished anything-if I was just ordinary-would you still want me to come back like this?”

She froze. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. Her face went pale.

But I already had my answer.

I gave her a small smile, pulled my hand away, and walked through security.

Didn’t look back.

Later, I heard Claire’s marriage to Andrew was falling apart.

He was cheating on her, treating her like garbage.

She went running back to Mom and Dad, crying about it.

They felt bad for her, sure-but the company had been struggling for years and they needed the Williams family’s support.

So they told her to suck it up and deal with it.

Not long after that, Dad’s company hit a major crisis.

Bad decisions, poor management-everything started collapsing.

They reached out to me, hoping I could pull some strings in the energy sector and bail them out.

I said no.

Everything I’d built, I’d built on my own. It had nothing to do with them.

And I wasn’t about to let myself get dragged into their mess.

I stayed out West. Built a solid reputation in my field.

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A Missing Key, 218 Missed Calls, One Family Secret

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Chapter 12

Mentored grad students. Led research projects.

Spent weeks at a time out in the field doing survey work.

My life was simple, full, and quiet in all the right ways.

I met someone-a colleague.

He was kind, grounded, and respected the hell out of my work.

We got married. No big ceremony, just dinner with a handful of close friends.

We decided not to have kids. We were happy with each other and with the work we loved.

That distant, polished house I grew up in-the love, the resentment, all of it—

became nothing more than a memory from another lifetime.

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