Sweet Romance14 min read
The Three-Year Notebook
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1
The knock on my door came on the eight hundred and seventh day after we broke up.
I opened it because I had to — because the landlord's note was loose on the floor and because curiosity still bit me like a small dog. The man on the threshold looked both familiar and impossible to place.
"Tomas?" My mouth made the name before my brain could stop it.
He blinked. "Aurora."
"You have a nerve." I shut the door partway but didn't push him off the step. The ten square meters of my basement apartment felt exposed in his gaze.
"You live here?" He took one look and his pupils tightened like camera apertures.
"Is there a better question?" I lifted my chin. "Came to ask for a red envelope?"
He said nothing. He was thinner at the edges of his face, lines drawn into the sides that weren't there before, like someone had sketched him awake. He kept his hands in his coat pockets and looked at my apartment as if inventorying it.
"I have this," I said, fishing a crumpled two-hundred from my pocket. I tossed it at him. "Take it. I won't be at the wedding. You be happy."
He didn't bend to pick it up. The bill slid across the floor and fell unmoved.
He stood for a long moment, then asked, quietly, "Is three million enough for a bride price?"
I stuttered. The world tilted and something that had felt finished between us stirred — an old ache, the place where memory kept a red thread. "Three million?" I said. "What are you—"
"It will fix what you need fixed," he said. "It will let your family breathe."
For reasons I couldn't entirely explain, the money smoothed out something in me that rough nights and sharp bills could not. "If you’re buying my silence with cash, keep it," I said. "I prefer to be honest about pain."
He finally picked the money up, not from the rug but from my stare. "Three million. Enough?"
2
Three days later my bank account blinked with the number.
I walked into Tomas's office building with a reckless grin I couldn't keep small.
"You sold the house?" I asked. "Scientists don't usually do housing deals."
He looked at me like a man watching a slow machine puzzle together. "I sold it," he said. "I can be blunt. I flew to settle things. I said: marry me."
I almost laughed to avoid a smaller sound. "You can say things like that now? You left without a note and now you're courting me with property?"
He zipped a small luggage shut as if we were making a trivial plan. "Take the money," he said. "Fix your debts. Rent a better place."
"I could—" I hesitated. The old reasons I walked away from him were not all gone. Pride and pain festered. "I will pay it back."
"You don't have to," he said. "Think about it as... repair."
3
At the civil registry his watch said four, and he asked for a simple lunch afterward as if we were two colleagues grabbing noodles.
"You can stay in my place," he said when I hesitated about my cold basement. He smiled, a tiny, almost embarrassed crinkling that hit something I had kept varnished. He held out a key. "The underground is damp. Move upstairs."
My throat closed. "Why are you being kind to me now?"
He zipped a suitcase with precise fingers. "Because," he said, and had the honesty to sound small, "I thought I had lost you."
4
We married under a paper agreement. He added clauses with clinical exactness: three years only; we would separate after three years. He wrote down intimacy frequency as if it were an itemized bill. He wrote "three times a week," and then, with a smirk that should have been cruel but wasn't, he asked in a voice colder than his smile, "Is that enough?"
"Five?" I tried to make a joke of it and failed.
He raised his hand. "Three. I work late."
I signed. He signed. He used a fountain pen — the same one I had once given him on Valentine's Day. He hadn't thrown it away. I felt a bruise of something like hope.
5
"Do you want to sleep together tonight or not?" he asked later, standing at the bedroom door.
"For once, yes," I said, and we did. He surprised me in ways I had let myself forget. He held me after. He kissed my forehead and then gathered up his suit like an afterthought.
"Stay," I said.
"I have work," he replied. He kissed my forehead like someone practicing a kindness he wasn't sure how to be.
I watched him leave and felt like a child learning to read a strange alphabet. I cried ten minutes into sleep, the way you let a knot unspool when nobody is watching.
6
There were small, strange recoveries.
"Do you have enough money?" he asked, one morning, watching me fumbling with an app to order lunch.
"Yes," I said too quickly. "The three million helped. I'll pay you back."
"That's all right," he said. He put his jacket over my shoulders that evening when the breeze came through the window. He smiled once, once, in the hallway at the exact right place where hallway light bent his cheekbones into something tender. The smile was small. It altered my nitrogenous blood.
7
We learned the rhythm of each other again as if rehearsing a dance from memory. He tracked the nights I had nightmares and, without being asked, would come sit by my bedside at two a.m. He would pull my hair back, check my pulse, hold the heating pad to my knees.
"You don't have to," I'd say.
He always answered in that soft, inattentive way that made me dizzy. "I want to."
8
There were dark things, too.
My brother had died when I was young. My parents had lost everything to an investment that went bad — fraud, my father's voice said in confession, hands shaking at dinner. Three million. Our house had been collateral. I left the country because I couldn't watch my family’s shame and helplessness anymore.
Back then I said hard words to Tomas on a bench outside our university library. "Go sell real estate," I'd said. "Go do whatever will get you money. Don't waste your life for lab grants and unknowns."
He had listened and done the opposite. He bent the path I thought I had set for him into something else, and we broke.
9
Once, at a teahouse, a woman I had assumed to be his new lover — Katya Almeida — sat across from me with a hand on her belly and a look like morning fog. I said, cruelly, "Is the baby his?"
She smiled a quiet, tired smile. "Aurora," she said. "Two years ago you left. I was only his friend, then. He waited for you in ways you don't understand."
"She is your friend?" I asked, sour as lemon.
"Always," she said. "He never forgot you."
Her words were a match in dry grass.
10
Over the months, Tomas's behaviors made a strange map. He counted things. He wrote lists and kept them in a small notebook with a cracked leather cover — little bullet points about meals, meetings, tasks, and the phrase that made my heart trip: "Help girlfriend repay three million: done." There were items like "Three times a week: ongoing" and "Future plan: separate after three years."
The notebook was like a small, honest ledger of a man trying to anchor himself.
"Why write it down?" I asked when I found it.
"So I don't lose you," he said.
"Do you think one day you will?" I asked.
"Once," he said slowly, eyes far away. "I thought I would lose everything."
11
He disappeared for three months.
No calls. His phone closed. I thought he'd left for work travel. Friends told me something else: that he had been diagnosed with memory lapses, that doctors had cautioned him about long-term decline.
When he came back he looked more fragile but also somehow steadier. He told me a story as if from another life: a flight to the U.S., an appointment, a doctor who said scary things and then turned out to be more ordinary than terrifying. The MRI they ran in the end looked fine.
"The doctors said it's psychological, not organic," he said. "It feels like a storm. We can weather it."
12
I began to care for him in a way I had not expected. He needed someone to keep the map of his days. I became that person. He became the person who, in the small light that remained, made me feel seen.
He would forget and then remember. He would say, in the middle of a ministry meeting, "I owe Aurora thirteen nights" and then write it down dutifully. He could be impatient and then soft as marsh in the next breath.
There were moments that made me breathless.
"You're the only one who ever did this for me," he'd whispered once as he tucked a blanket around my shoulders. He'd never said anything like that before.
"You say that a lot," I said.
"No," he said. "I mean it."
He put his palm to my dying lamp and said, "I keep a list so I don't forget to tell you."
I could have argued numbers. I didn't. I let my fingers curl into his.
13
Then the past hovered like fog.
Someone had swindled my mother out of large sums. "Octavio Bonnet," my father said on a bad night, naming the man he'd met at a seminar, the man who had offered safe returns and layered assurances. "Octavio promised land-backed returns, and we trusted him."
"Why didn't we sue?" I asked.
"We were small," my father said. "We were ashamed. We were fools."
The debt and the shame had pushed me away to save what was left.
14
When I discovered the truth — not conveniently, but in a way that tore the skin off the old story — it threw everything into a bright, painful clarity.
Octavio Bonnet was not a neighbor or a friend. He was a reputable real estate financier on the city's glossy brochure covers. He had offices with marble lobbies. He gave lectures and gave pictures with press microphones.
I found his name on a complaint forum and then, because courage can be a kind of foolishness, I called the charity that supported victims. They told me to come to a public meeting that evening where several investors had gathered to demand accountability.
15
The meeting was set in a public conference room with glass doors. Cameras found us like flies find sugar. Local reporters were already there, scribbling.
"Octavio Bonnet will not be allowed to just go on with glossy photos," one of the victims told a reporter. "We trusted him."
I felt my palms sweat. My mother sat beside me, a small, guarded woman in a cardigan, her eyes sharp with a shame that had turned into a hard, steady hunger for justice.
16
Octavio arrived in a tuxedo jacket and a tired smile. He walked through the door like a man stepping into a theater. He had spoken at my father's seminar; he had smiled in family photos; he had never expected the little ledger of names to find its way to this place.
"You promised returns," one of my neighbors said. "You took our houses' titles."
"You sold our trust," another woman said.
Octavio's face was practiced calm. "I have never defrauded anyone," he said. "Any loss was market-driven."
An angry voice rose in the crowd. "Market-driven? You sold dreams on paper and then closed the doors."
Octavio lifted a hand. "I will answer questions," he said, the public microphone making his voice round. "But slander is not a substitute for investigation."
17
We were many. There were victims with stooped shoulders and neat suits and mothers who still had babies' doodles folded into their wallets. The reporter's camera panned and lit us all like a jury. My mother stood up, hands trembling.
"You told us to put money in your fund," she said, voice breaking but loud enough. "You gave my husband a business card and promised life. We trusted you. You took my son's future."
Octavio's practiced mask cracked. His eyes flicked to a security guard at the door. "We have a legal path," he murmured.
"Legal now," someone shouted, "but who pays for the years we lost?"
The crowd's noise became a tide.
18
Octavio tried to steer the conversation toward paperwork. "We can settle," he said, voice smooth as lacquer. "Let's have mediation."
We had the names, the transfers, the cancelled registrations in our hands. We had the ledger of truth, not his spokesman words. A woman stood with her child in her arms and said, "Return the money, or I will film this and follow you."
Octavio's jaw moved. He had never before faced so many people whose lives he'd tangled into a braid and cut loose.
19
"You're not just a figurehead," my father said when Octavio tried to speak to a lawyer. "You are a man who placed our homes as collateral. You took what was not yours. You promised safety and sold risk."
My father was not eloquent; he didn't need to be. He just needed to stand there and point at the man who had, for years, been on stage telling people how to make secure choices.
"Payment," Octavio said too quickly. "Installments. We can..."
"No," my mother interrupted, stepping forward. Her hands were not the hands that signed promissory notes; they were the hands that folded our shirts when we were small. "You will not drown us in slow poison. Return our names and our money now, or you will never walk into a public place again."
20
The public shaming that followed was not theatrical; it was legal and searing. A reporter asked Octavio, on camera: "Did you misrepresent the security of assets?" He stammered. His PR officer leaned in like a reed, whispering law.
Then came the moment that unravelled his high-gloss life.
One of the victims, a soft-spoken accountant, had kept clean copies of all transaction confirmations. She pulled them out, and the room went silent — a silence like when a bell is struck. The documents placed in front of Octavio revealed discrepancies, offshore accounts, and transfers to shell companies.
"Court records, bank statements, and the letters," she said slowly, "these show the transfers to companies controlled by you."
That was the cut. The cameras zoomed. Octavio's eyes widened like a man with a sudden understanding of his own anatomy. His smile disappeared as if someone had pulled at a thread.
21
"You can deny it," my mother said with the precision of a woman who had learned to measure pain, "but people have proof."
Octavio walked backward a few steps, then sat down heavily as if a floor had given way. His voice, once smooth, came out thin. "There was risk," he said. "Markets—I'm a businessman—"
"You're a thief," someone called.
He rose, paces uneven, and then the first sound of flailing began: denial, then a crumble, then pleading.
"It wasn't supposed to go like this," Octavio said, clasping his jacket. His face showed the stages — arrogance, irritation, surprise, then real fear. The cameramen leaned in, lenses hungry.
"You're talking like a cornered animal," said a reporter. "Did you ever think what you'd do to people who trusted you?"
Octavio blinked. He seemed surprised that a man who sold confidence could be stripped of his own.
22
"I will make restitution," he muttered, but the words felt small in the bright room. A woman in the crowd started clapping in bitter rhythm, the kind of clapping that is not praise but the sound of people trying to shape anger into something manageable.
The crowd's reaction became the punishment. People took out their phones and recorded. They stood and told their stories, each one a small hammer. Octavio's smile had become a thin, frightened line.
He tried to step toward us and then away. He tried to address the reporters and then dodged, his voice breaking into denial and then pleading. "I didn't know—" he said. "My accountants—"
We watched him shift, posture and face morphing. The arrogance that had charmed banquet rooms collapsed like a stage set in wind. He tried to explain, to place blame. He reached for legal explanations and found only cold eyes.
23
"What will your family say?" someone shouted from the back, where a line of victims stood. "What will your board say when they see you on the news?"
Octavio's composure unraveled. He clutched at the podium as if it were the only thing anchorable in the room. "I will cooperate," he said. "I will pay reparations."
"We want it in writing," my father said. "We want public apology, and a schedule of full payments. We want criminal referral."
A hush passed. A camera caught Octavio's breaths. He realized then — and with the dreadful clarity of a man who has seen his insurance burn — that his public face would now be a ledger of losses.
24
The crowd's response was a slow, collective legal pressure. The media pushed. The police took notes. Civil suits began that week.
For Octavio it was a public crumble. He had been immune to gossip because his face was on the magazines; now his face was on the floor. People who once sought his signature tore those pages in front of cameras. Neighbors called him a liar. A woman who had been his champion on a morning show phoned and then turned off her comments.
He tried to make excuses before a microphone and then stopped mid-sentence, the bravado gone. He sat as the reporters asked questions he couldn't answer.
Octavio's reaction moved through stages: disbelief, bravado, denial, then a brittle kind of pleading. He begged for time, for mediation, for accountant audits. People filmed him with their phones like a slow, nonviolent execution.
25
The punishment was not a single theater moment. It was a procession of consequences. His partners called meetings. Files were subpoenaed. Investors held him to the light. The man who had sold comfort was now being asked in public to repay pain.
We had our satisfaction: not cruelty, but accountability. He stood in the center of it, small and human and very exposed. He reached for sympathy and found only the faces of people he had wronged.
26
After Octavio's collapse, life felt lighter and also rawer. My mother spoke less. She looked at me with a softness that wasn't forgiveness but the possibility of something like it.
"Thank you," she said one evening, fingers busy with a dish towel. "Maybe we do not need to disappear into shame."
"I still cannot forgive everything," I said. "But I will help you rebuild."
27
Tomas and I found our way through new things. He went for treatments; his memory faltered sometimes and then returned like a tide. Once he stood in the doorway of the nursery with a small paper hat and said, "I wrote that I will never forget." The notebook lay on the table, its pages thick with his careful handwriting.
"Thirteen?" I teased when he counted the nights he owed me.
He looked at his hand like a man who had looked at a star map and suddenly seen his coordinates. He smiled. "Thirty-three," he corrected, fingers curling around mine.
We had small triumphs. He came to my mother's chemo appointment and sat politely, asking about dates and medication. He brought me soup after a long day and put a hand on my shoulder in a theater of ordinary mercy. He smiled at me in public, once at a grocery store when our hands bumped reaching for the same jar of coffee — and the smile went somewhere under my ribs like sunshine.
28
"Our three years," he said one night in the dark, voice a careful thing, "was always meant to give me time to love what matters. If I forget, will you still love me?"
I measured the simple man on the bed and the ledger on the table. "You wrote it all down," I said. "But words are not everything. I will be here."
He breathed and let himself believe it for a little while.
29
The pregnancy was small and secret at first and then wide as news. We told my parents with nerves. My mother called him "son" once and then blushed and denied it. We went to the hospital together; we signed birth papers. At night he would sit in the living room and stare at the notebook, his thumb tracing the phrase, "Help girlfriend repay three million: done."
"You're stubborn about that debt," I said once, tickled.
He looked at me like a man who loves the sound of an old coin. "It was a promise."
30
On the day our child was born, I packed the hospital bag with a practiced fretfulness. I found another letter in his writing, half folded in the drawer; he had written it three years prior. He left it folded like an anchor.
"If one day I forget your name," it began, "it will be like something in me has gone gray. Remember me kindly. Remember the small things. If I'm gone, I want you to know I tried."
I folded the paper back and slid it into my dress. I was not sure I wanted to be cruel enough to open it now. I wanted to carry that uncertainty like a private talisman.
31
In the delivery room, he held my hand like a man counting heartbeats. People buzzed outside the doors; nurses moved with personalities that were soft and efficient. He whispered, "I will help you hold this child," and I believed him.
When the baby finally came out and made that perfect, furious noise, he cried like a man in a cathedral. I saw him look at the child and then at me, and something released in him.
"I remember you," he said then, very plainly, voice thin with astonishment. "I remember us."
We walked out with a small, ordinary life. Outside the hospital, the world kept its own pace. Tomas gave my hand a squeeze so full of speech it made me laugh.
32
Months later Octavio Bonnet's legal file was a public thing. He had been fined, his assets frozen, ordered to make restitution and to face further criminal inquiry. His public humiliation held consequences. He read his name on the paper the way a man reads a conscience.
For me, the public punishment had been a necessary closing. It was not about cruelty. It was about the righting of scales that had tilted and the exposure of lies wrapped in gilt. I felt lighter and also wary.
33
We learned to live with small amends and small pleasures. Tomas wrote in his notebook like a man stacking wood for winter, steady and rhythmic. I called him at work when I needed the comfort of his voice. He came to my parents' dinners and memorized their coffee orders. He put quiet effort into being present.
There were still nights when he would get up in panic, searching for names he couldn't remember. There were also mornings when he would hold me and count the tiny ribs of our baby and laugh.
34
One evening, five years after the first knock that started this strange circle, I took out the notebook from his drawer. The pages had been filled with the slow business of living: groceries, meetings, a line that read "three times a week: ongoing" and crosses where we had counted nights of tenderness.
I closed it and wrote on a fresh page: "One lifetime: if you forget, I will remember for both of us."
He came in and read over my shoulder and laughed softly. "It's not fair you beat me with romance."
"It's our ledger now," I said.
We walked to the nursery and watched the child sleep, cheeks like little moons. Outside the road hummed. Inside, our small life was a lantern.
35
When I tucked him in that night, Tomas said, quietly, "Three million is on the past. Three years taught me how to keep the present."
I kissed his forehead. "And thirteen nights are coming due," I teased.
He put his hand over mine like a benediction. "And I'll pay them," he said.
We lived the rest of our days as a ledger of ordinary deeds: kindnesses, apologies, laughter, the making of soup. How anyone else would judge it didn't matter. We had learned to trust in small returns.
The End
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