All Chapters of Puck Me, Stepbrother : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

VERA'S POV"You're staring.""I'm observing. There's a difference."The man beside me at the bar doesn't laugh. He tilts his head slightly, like he's deciding whether I'm worth the effort, and then the corner of his mouth lifts just enough to make my stomach do something I immediately decide to ignore."And what exactly are you observing?""A room full of people pretending to care about a charity they Googled twenty minutes before arriving."That gets a real reaction. Not a full smile — something more controlled than that. Like he's someone who learned a long time ago not to give too much away in public.I don't blame him. I learned the same thing.The gala is exactly what I expected, overpriced, overstaffed, and stuffed with people whose net worth could solve several international crises but who are here tonight because it looks good in a press release. I came because my editor told me Richard Harrington's annual charity event was the kind of room a journalist should be seen in. I pu

VERA'S POV He doesn't answer the question.My father calls him over before he gets the chance and Cole stands up, straightens his jacket, and walks away like he didn't just drop something heavy between us and leave it there. I watch him cross the garden and fall into easy conversation with Richard and I note how effortlessly he does it — the smile, the posture, the way he fills the space his father expects him to fill.Performer. Just like his father.Except something about Cole feels different from Richard in a way I can't fully name yet. Richard smiles and you feel managed. Cole smiles and you feel like you just missed something important happening behind it.I stay on the bench until the reception thins and then I find my mother and hug her and tell her she looks happy. She does look happy. That's the part that makes my chest tight — she genuinely looks happier than I've seen her in years and I'm standing inside a situation that might eventually destroy that happiness completely

VERA'S POV Three days pass. We exist in the same house like two people sharing an orbit without touching — close enough to feel the pull, careful enough not to follow it. Meals happen. Conversations happen. My mother floats through all of it happy and warm and completely unaware that the two people sitting at her table are carrying something between them that has no clean name.Cole is good at normal. Dangerously good. He talks to my mother with genuine warmth and sits across from his father with practiced ease and passes the salt when I need it without making it a moment. He is the most composed person I have ever watched operate in a complicated situation and I find it equal parts impressive and exhausting because I cannot tell where the performance ends and the person begins.I think that might be the point.I spent those three days doing two things. Working and watching.The work is the investigation — reorganizing my notes, identifying the gaps, building a cleaner picture of the

COLE'S POVThe address I send her is a storage unit I've rented under Milo's name for eight months.Not glamorous. Twelve by twelve feet, a folding table, two chairs, a lamp I brought from my apartment, and three locked boxes that contain everything I've been quietly pulling from the organization's internal systems since I realized my father wasn't just cutting corners — he was dismantling something deliberately.I get there an hour before her and unlock everything and spread it out in the order I want her to see it.I'm not nervous. I don't get nervous before games, before press, before my father's interrogations dressed as conversations. But I stand in that room and look at eight months of careful, solitary work laid out on a folding table and something in my chest pulls tight.This is the part where it becomes real for someone other than me.She arrives exactly on time. Knocks twice, which I didn't ask her to do, but it's very her — announcing herself without waiting for permission

COLE'S POVPaulson is in his office after practice, door half open, game tape running on his laptop with the sound low. He's been coaching for twenty-two years and he watches tape the way other men read — constantly, quietly, like it's where he goes to think.I knock once and he waves me in without looking up."Close the door," he says.I do. He lets the tape run for another thirty seconds then pauses it and leans back."I wondered when you were coming," he says.I sit down across from him. "You knew I would?""You've been distracted for three weeks. Different kind of distracted than usual." He folds his arms. "What's going on Cole."I've run this conversation in my head a dozen times. Every version starts with careful framing and controlled information and protecting the parts that don't need to be exposed yet. I sit in his office and look at the man who pulled me off the ice at twenty-two after a game where I played angry and told me privately that the best players use pain as fuel