All Chapters of RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

MargueriteCadenI asked Marguerite to come to the house.Not the phone. Not a conversation I was going to have secondhand through a speaker while everything else burned around us. If she had something to tell me about my mother, eleven years late, I needed to be in the room for it.She arrived at one. Older than I remembered — she’d been in her fifties when she worked for my mother, which made her close to seventy now, hair fully white, hands trembling slightly as Mrs. Dalton showed her into the study. She looked at me and her eyes filled immediately.“You look so much like her,” she said. “Around the eyes.”I gestured to the chair across from me. Aria sat beside me, quiet, present, her hand finding mine on the armrest between us without either of us deciding it.“Marguerite,” I said. “Tell me.”She folded her hands in her lap. Took a breath.“Your mother didn’t die of a stroke,” she said. “That’s what the certificate says. That’s what everyone was told. But I was there that night,

The AccountCadenDiane came down the stairs slowly, coat still on, and stood in the doorway of the study looking at the two of us like she already knew exactly what had been said on that call.“An account in my name,” she said. “Opened two days ago. Used to pay off a doctor in Florida.” She let that sit for a moment. “I assume that’s what I just heard.”“Diane—”“I didn’t open it.” She said it simply, without heat, the way you state a fact you’ve already accepted is going to be doubted. “Two days ago I was at my sister’s in Duluth dealing with the fact that my marriage had just ended. I wasn’t opening offshore accounts, Caden.”“I know.”“Do you?” She crossed her arms. “Because right now your lawyer is sitting on information that puts my name on a payment that frames Marguerite as a liar. If that’s the story that gets out, I’m not just your ex-wife anymore. I’m complicit. I’m part of covering up what happened to your mother.”I watched Caden process this. Watched the calculation move

LiveAriaI watched Caden’s face change and felt every ounce of warmth from the last ten minutes drain straight out of the room.“Active where,” he said again, slower this time, like he needed to hear it twice to believe it.I couldn’t hear the other end of the call but I didn’t need to. I watched Caden stand up, gently moving me off his lap, and cross to the window, phone pressed to his ear, his whole body going into that controlled, coiled stillness I’d learned meant something very bad was happening.“Show me,” he said. “Now. I don’t care what time it is.”He hung up. Turned to me.“There’s a second device,” he said. “Active. Transmitting from inside this house, right now, tonight.”“Where,” I said, my voice barely working.“They’re locating it as we speak.” He crossed back to me, took both my hands, pulled me up from the chair. “Aria, listen to me. Whatever this is, we deal with it together. Don’t go anywhere alone tonight. Stay with me.”“Okay,” I said. My heart was pounding so h

Last RitesCadenI didn’t want to go.Let me be honest about that. I stood in the hallway with my keys in my hand and my jacket on and Aria looking at me from the study doorway with that expression she wore when she was trying not to ask me not to do something, and I didn’t want to go.Romano Voss was lying in a hospital bed asking for me and my first instinct, the one that lived underneath all the conditioning and obligation and complicated grief of being his son, was to let him lie there.But I went.Because I always went. Because forty-two years of being Caden Voss had taught me that you face the things that scare you before they grow into something you can’t face at all. And because Sophia was sitting in my study with a drive that contained a recording of my father confessing to my mother’s death, and if he was asking for me tonight specifically then he knew about Sophia and he knew about the drive and I needed to look him in the eye when I told him it was over.“I’m coming with

What My Mother KnewAriaI put the call on speaker.Not because I thought Caden had a right to hear it before I decided whether to let him. Because whatever my mother was about to say, he needed to be in the room for it. We were past the point of managing information separately. We were past the point of a lot of things.“Talk to me,” I said. “From the beginning.”My mother exhaled.“Romano contacted me six months before Caden proposed,” she said. “Not after. Before. Which means he’d already been watching Caden’s life long enough to know the relationship was moving in that direction.” A pause. “He told me he wanted information. Nothing specific, he said — just the texture of things. How Caden was feeling about certain business decisions. Whether he was stressed. Whether he was vulnerable.” Her voice stayed even. Controlled. “He said it like it was nothing. Like he was just a concerned father who wanted to understand his son better.”“But you knew it wasn’t that,” I said.“I knew imme