All Chapters of They Wanted Me Gone, So I Became Unforgettable: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Zoe’s POV:I did not tell my mum about Daniel.Not because I was hiding it. I wasn’t hiding it. I was simply not volunteering information that had not been requested and there’s a significant difference between those two things which I have been explaining to Noah since we were children and which he has never fully accepted.My mum found out.Not from me. Not from Noah who I had explicitly told to say nothing and who had said nothing for four entire days which was a personal record. Not from Clara who understood information security. Not from anyone I could identify or hold accountable.She just knew.This is the thing about my mum that I have been trying to understand my whole life. She doesn’t ask questions. She doesn’t push. She waits and she watches and she notices things that other people don’t notice and then at some point she says something and it turns out she has known for longer than you thought.We were in the kitchen on Saturday morning and I was eating toast and she was m

Zoe’s POV:Noah waited exactly one day after the coffee before he asked me about it.Which for Noah was restraint of a caliber I had not previously witnessed and which I chose to acknowledge by answering him instead of telling him it was none of his business which was my default position on most things he asked about my life.He came and sat on the end of my bed on Friday evening while I was reading and said so and I said so and he said how was it and I said fine and he said Zoe and I said it was good Noah it was genuinely good and he nodded with the expression of someone receiving information they had already anticipated and were pleased to have confirmed.“He’s good,” Noah said.“You said that already,” I said.“Well I’m saying it again,” he said. “Because now you have had coffee with him and you know it too and I want to be on record as having known first.”“You did not know first,” I said. “You knew before me because Max told you things that were not his to tell.”“Max told me thi

Zoe’s POV:I told my mother about the building on Sunday.Not about Daniel specifically. Not about what the afternoon had been or the particular way he had stood beside the east windows and waited while I looked without filling the silence. I told her about the building because the building was the part that required telling and the rest was mine to keep for now.She was in the studio when I found her.Sketch notebook open, pencil in hand, the particular stillness of someone who is doing the work that matters to them. I had grown up watching this and I knew better than to interrupt it so I sat in the chair in the corner and waited and she finished what she was doing and looked up.“Grant and Fifth,” I said.She put her pencil down.“The old press building,” she said.“You know it,” I said.“I walked past it for two years thinking about it,” she said. “What happened to it?”“Someone bought it,” I said. “Two years ago. He has been trying to figure out what to do with it.”She looked at

Zoe’s POV:Grandma Victoria turned eighty in the way she did everything, with complete composure and zero tolerance for fuss.She had told us in September that she did not want a party and my mother had said of course and my father had said whatever you want and I had written party in the green notebook and underlined it twice because Victoria saying she did not want a party was not the same as Victoria not wanting to be acknowledged and the difference between those two things was something I had understood about her since I was approximately seven years old.The party was small.Victoria’s definition of small and everyone else’s definition of small were different things but we met in the middle, which was twelve people at the house on the street twelve minutes from ours, which Victoria had been in for several years now and which had a garden she had opinions about and a sitting room with curtains my mother had chosen and which Victoria had been telling people she had chosen herself e

Zoe’s POV: Noah had decided he wanted to study engineering. He had not announced this the way I would have announced it, with research and a prepared explanation and answers ready for the questions that would follow. He had said it at dinner one evening between eating his vegetables last, which he still did, and asking if there was more bread, which he always did, and my parents had looked at each other and my mother had said tell me more and Noah had said I want to understand how things hold together and my father had said that is engineering and Noah had said yes I know that is why I said it. He had been talking to Dean about structural things for two years. Not formally. Just in the way that Noah gathered information, by finding someone who knew something and asking them about it until he understood it, and Dean knew about structural things from the property law side of it and had started pointing Noah toward actual engineers he knew and Noah had been reading what they recommend