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Chapter fifty four:
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2026-06-24 19:40:23
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RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty five:
Saturday CoffeeCadenSaturday arrived and took the house with it.Not in the crisis sense. In the sense that Saturday turned out to be the kind of day that had too much in it to belong to any single thread — David arriving at nine for coffee with Aria, Leah finally, genuinely leaving at eleven with her bags and her car and a departure that was more emotional than she wanted to admit, my mother rearranging the east guest room for Eleanor and James’s arrival in two days, and me in the study at seven in the morning with coffee and the property documents David had sent through the night before.I’d read them twice by the time the house woke up.The development site in St. Paul.Two acres, commercially zoned, sitting untouched in Romano’s estate for twenty-two years, the project that was supposed to happen having collapsed when its architect was killed and its financier decided the legal exposure wasn’t worth the build.The property itself was worth considerably more than it had been in 2
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty four :
Four DaysAriaThursday afternoon I did something I hadn’t done since arriving in Minnesota.I went shopping.Not crisis shopping, not grab-what-you-need-before-the-next-catastrophe shopping. Actual, unhurried, no-agenda shopping. Just me and Leah, who had extended her visit by two days because she said she wasn’t leaving until she’d seen the house functioning like a normal household and was willing to wait as long as it took.We walked through a mall in Minneapolis that had no significance to anything that had happened this month and looked at things that had nothing to do with inheritances or DNA results or civil lawsuits and it was, genuinely, the most restorative two hours I’d had in four weeks.Leah bought three things she didn’t need and was completely unapologetic about it.I bought a dress.Not for any specific occasion. Just because I saw it and wanted it and hadn’t wanted something simple in a long time without the wanting being complicated by everything else.Dark green. So
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty three:
The CVAriaHe actually remembered.That was the thing that got me when I came downstairs Thursday morning to find the study door open, the desk cleared of everything except my laptop and a fresh coffee waiting beside it, and Caden sitting in the chair across from where I usually sat like he’d been there a while.He’d made a note to himself about my CV.Four weeks ago I’d mentioned it once, in passing, the morning after I arrived — something about getting a job, building a life, the things I’d come back here planning to do before my life caught fire. I’d mentioned it and then it had disappeared under everything else, and he’d kept it somewhere, quietly, and had set up the study and made coffee and waited.That was Caden.That was the part of him that had nothing to do with boardrooms or control or the cold commanding presence that reorganized rooms. The part that made notes about things that mattered to the people he loved and followed through on them at nine in the morning when the
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty two:
Leah Comes BackCadenLeah arrived at seven with two bottles of wine, enough food for approximately eleven people, and the energy of someone who had been restraining herself for a week and had decided restraint was officially over.She walked past me at the door with the ease of someone who had long since stopped treating this house as somewhere she needed permission to be, set everything on the kitchen counter, turned around, looked at me directly for the first time since she’d left, and said — “You told her you loved her.”Not a question.“Yes,” I said.“First time you’ve said that to anyone,” she said. Also not a question.“Aria told you,” I said.“Aria tells me everything,” Leah said. “That’s what I’m for.” She looked at me with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously — assessment, approval, something that might have been warmth if Leah’s warmth wasn’t always wrapped in something sharper. “Good. It was time.”She turned back to the food and started unpacking it
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty one:
SettlingAriaThe week after everything settled was the strangest week of my life.Stranger than the week it happened, honestly. Because the week it happened I was running on adrenaline and crisis and the specific tunnel vision of someone navigating disaster, which meant I didn’t have the bandwidth to feel all of it. I was just moving, just handling, just getting through.The week after, I felt all of it.Not in a bad way. Not in the collapsing, can’t-function way I’d been half bracing for. Just — fully. The way you feel things when there’s finally room for them and your nervous system has permission to process instead of manage.I cried twice on Monday for reasons I couldn’t entirely explain and then felt significantly better.I ate three proper meals on Tuesday which sounds minor and wasn’t.On Wednesday I slept until ten and woke up without checking my phone first and lay there in the quiet of Caden’s room with the morning light doing its thing and felt something that took me a min
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter sixty:
Wabasha StreetCadenThe bank opened at nine.We were there at eight fifty-three because Aria had been awake since seven and her version of waiting patiently was arriving seven minutes early and standing on the pavement in the cold looking at the door like she could make it open faster through sustained eye contact.I stood beside her with coffee I’d brought from home in two travel cups and said nothing about the eye contact because I understood it.Twenty-two years of something was inside that building.David was on her other side, hands in his coat pockets, quieter than he’d been all week. He’d barely spoken over dinner the night before, not withdrawn, just internal, processing in the way I was learning was his version of preparing for something significant.Thomas was behind us, white haired, solid, the key already in his coat pocket where it had apparently lived for two decades.My lawyer was inside, already there, having arrived at eight forty-five because I’d asked him to and h
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty nine
What Was On The DriveAriaI found it by accident.Sophia had handed me the drive twenty minutes after Caden left, told me to keep it safe, and gone to make coffee in the kitchen like a woman who had just blown up her entire life and needed something warm to hold afterward. I understood that. I res
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty eight
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
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty six
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
RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad. Chapter twenty five
By TomorrowCadenI stared at that message until the words stopped meaning anything and started again.By tomorrow, you won’t have a company left to fight for.My father, somewhere in federal custody or out of it depending on which version of the call I believed, still finding ways to reach into m
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