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Chapter thirty

Author: Betty Johnson
last update publish date: 2026-06-16 14:13:16

What My Mother Knew

Aria

I 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 b
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  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter fifty six :

    WilliamCadenI stared at the message for a long time.*I'd very much like to speak with my son.*His son.I was somebody's son in a way that had never once applied to Romano — not really, not in any sense that felt true rather than documented. Romano had claimed me, kept me, competed with me, tried to dismantle me from the inside out, and written mine regardless at the bottom of a paternity test he'd buried for twenty-three years.William Ashford had texted me my son in a single line and it landed somewhere Romano's forty-two years of ownership never had."Caden." Aria's voice, quiet. "Breathe."I breathed."He called you his son," she said."Yes," I said."He already knows," she said. "Eleanor told him everything. He processed it and he picked up his phone and he called you his son in the first sentence." She paused. "That's who he is."I looked at the message again.Typed back before the controlled part of my brain could suggest waiting, suggesting timing, suggesting the careful m

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter fifty five:

    Finally.AriaI woke up the next morning and nobody had tried to destroy anything overnight.I checked my phone before I was fully conscious, which had become a reflex over the last three weeks — the specific anxious alertness of someone who had learned that mornings could arrive carrying things. Unknown numbers. Screenshots. Recordings. Filing cabinets. Half siblings. Genealogy results.Nothing.Eight hours of genuine nothing.I put the phone face down and lay there in Caden’s bed in Caden’s room with Caden asleep beside me and let the nothing be everything for a few minutes.Outside the window Minnesota was doing something that looked almost like proper morning — actual sunlight, the kind that committed rather than suggested, coming through the curtains at an angle that made the room look warmer than it probably was.I turned my head.Caden was asleep on his stomach, face turned toward me, one arm stretched across the mattress in my direction like he’d been reaching for something in

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter fifty four:

    James.CadenI read the message three times.Each time the words stayed exactly the same, which meant I was going to have to deal with them rather than hope they rearranged into something less significant.I think it means I have a brother I didn’t know about. If that’s you, I’d very much like to talk.Direct. Clean. No performance, no drama, just a man in London who had received an unexpected notification and decided the honest response was the honest response.I already liked him slightly. Which was an absurd thing to feel about a stranger whose existence I’d known about for approximately forty minutes.“He moves fast,” Aria said beside me.“He’s an architect,” I said. “They’re decisive.”She looked at me. “You don’t know any architects.”“I know William Ashford designed two significant buildings in the eighties that I apparently studied in a business context without knowing he was my biological father,” I said. “Which is a sentence I need a moment with.”Aria pressed her lips toget

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter fifty three:

    The Match.AriaThe name on the screen was James Ashford.Caden stared at it for a long moment without speaking, which from Caden meant he was doing something significant internally that hadn’t surfaced yet as words or action.Sophia leaned over his shoulder and read the result.“Half sibling,” she said quietly. “That’s the relationship category. Not parent. Half sibling.”“William Ashford has a son named James,” Caden said slowly. “One of the two children he knows about.”“Which means James Ashford is your half brother,” I said.The sentence sat in the kitchen like something that needed a moment to become real.Caden set the phone down on the counter.Stepped back.Ran both hands through his hair, which was the most unguarded physical gesture I’d ever seen from him, the Caden version of I genuinely don’t know what to do with this.“Two days ago I had one father,” he said. “Who was terrible. Today I have a biological father I’ve never met in Edinburgh and apparently a half brother wh

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter fifty two:

    What Romano Kept.CadenSomething that involves Caden directly. Something Caden doesn’t know about himself.I read Sophia’s message over Aria’s shoulder and felt something shift in my chest that wasn’t fear exactly. More like the specific awareness of a man who has spent three weeks uncovering his father’s secrets and has just been informed there is apparently still one more.Of course there was one more.There was always one more with Romano.“We should go back,” Aria said, already turning.“Yes,” I said.She told the others something vague about Sophia needing us, the way she’d gotten very good at saying exactly enough to redirect without alarming, and David read her face and read mine and nodded once and said they’d carry on walking for a bit.We went back.Sophia was at the kitchen table with both laptops open and three separate document windows on the larger screen, her coffee untouched beside her in the way that meant she’d gotten deep into something and forgotten it existed.S

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter fifty one:

    Almost Normal.AriaWe got home at noon and nobody tried to destroy anything for three whole hours.I want to document that. Three consecutive hours of absolutely nothing catastrophic happening. No unknown numbers. No smoke. No lawyers calling with emergency motions. No surveillance footage of people who looked like my mother. Just the house, and the people in it, and the particular exhausted quiet of a group of humans who had collectively survived something and were allowing themselves to stop running for five minutes.Leah made lunch.Actual lunch, with multiple components, the kind that required planning and more than one pot, which was her way of saying everything is going to be okay without using any of those words because Leah expressed love through food and always had.We ate at the big dining table. All of us — me and Caden, my mother, David, Margaret, Sophia, Leah. Eight people around a table that had only ever really been used for tense, formal dinners with business associat

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter twenty two

    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

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter twenty one

    A Name From The PastCadenI read the message over Aria’s shoulder and felt something in my chest go very cold.Elena.I hadn’t heard that name out loud in fourteen years. I’d built an entire life around the fact that I would never have to hear it again — buried it under work, under Diane, under e

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter twenty

    NamedAriaLeah saw it before I did.I was in her bathroom brushing my teeth at seven forty-five, still half asleep, still processing the fact that my mother had apparently left for Duluth and I was allowed to go home and trying to figure out how I felt about all of that, when Leah knocked on the b

  • RUINED BY DADDY: defiled by my stepdad.   Chapter nineteen

    Three In The MorningCadenMy phone rang at two fifty-seven.I was still awake. Sitting at my desk in the dark with the folder closed in front of me and a glass of scotch I hadn’t touched since eleven and the particular quality of silence that a house has when everything in it has changed.The num

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