Chapter 5 - Shadows of the Past
Two days after Tessa was served, Ryan came over to my house carrying a cardboard box full of items Tessa had left at his apartment over the past year.
We sat on the rug in the living room while Elsie was upstairs taking a nap.
“I started going through her stuff to pack it up,” Ryan said, his voice flat. “And I found something you need to see.”
He pulled out a blue leather-bound notebook.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s her old journals,” Ryan said, looking sick to his stomach. “Camille… I was blind. I was so completely blind.”
He opened the journal to a page dated three years ago—long before Ryan had ever met her.
As I read the entries, my skin crawled.
Tessa had a documented history of explosive, violent behavior. In her own handwriting, she detailed an incident at her previous job where she had been forced to resign after slapping a junior assistant during an argument over a project presentation. Her wealthy family had paid off the assistant with a non-disclosure agreement to keep her name out of the press.
Further down, there were pages where she wrote about Ryan.
She hadn't loved him. She had selected him.
She wrote about my family with terrifying calculation: “Ryan’s family is respectable, well-connected locally, and easy to control. The mother is desperate for picture-perfect family harmony and will excuse anything to keep the peace. The sister is a pathetic widow who stays out of the way. If I get Ryan to propose by Christmas, I can take over his trust fund distributions and push the sister out of the family estate entirely.”
I dropped the notebook onto the carpet.
“She planned this,” I whispered, horrified. “She planned to isolate us from the very beginning.”
“She picked Elsie’s star on purpose,” Ryan said, his hands shaking. “She told me two weeks before Thanksgiving that she hated that ‘cheap paper trash’ Dad let Elsie hang on the tree. She wanted everything to look like a magazine cover so she could post it for her followers. When Elsie stood up to her, she snapped because she couldn’t stand a five-year-old defying her control.”
“Have you shown this to Mr. Vance?” I asked.
“I brought it straight here,” Ryan said. “This proves pattern of behavior. It proves malice. Her lawyers won't be able to claim it was an 'accidental reaction.'”
At that moment, my phone chimed with a text message from an unknown number.
I opened it. It was a photo.
My stomach dropped into a abyss of pure ice.
May you like
The photo was taken from across the street of my house—just ten minutes ago. It showed my front porch, with Elsie’s small pink bicycle parked by the steps.
Below the photo was a text: “Drop the lawsuit and the restraining order by midnight, Camille. Or I will make sure everyone in this town knows what kind of mother you really are. You think you can ruin my life? I will burn yours to the ground.”
