MY EVIL STEPFATHER

DAISY'S POV The church smelled like white lilies and lies. I had chosen the lilies myself — Mum's favorite, the ones she used to buy from the corner market every Friday morning, the ones she'd arrange in that chipped blue vase she refused to throw away no matter how many times I offered to buy her a new one. Standing here now, watching them draped over her coffin in expensive, perfectly arranged sprays, I almost wished I had chosen something else. Something that didn't make her death look so curated. So deliberate. So much like something Maxwell Barrett would organize. The church was full. It surprised me, how full it was — Mum had always said she was a simple woman, that she hadn't collected many people in her life, just a few good ones. But the pews were lined with faces I half-recognized, neighbors and colleagues and women from her church group who were pressing handkerchiefs to their eyes with the practiced grief of people who had not actually known her. And at the very front, receiving their murmured condolences with a bowed head and a devastated expression that belonged on a stage, was Maxwell. My stepfather. My stomach turned every time someone touched his arm. I walked slowly down the aisle, and I could feel the shift in attention — heads turning, the quiet ripple that followed me everywhere I went now that my face was recognizable. Famous grieving daughter. They would have their cameras out the moment we stepped outside. I kept my eyes forward and my chin level and my hands locked together around the cross I was holding so tightly the metal edge was starting to leave a mark on my palm. Don't look at him. Don't look at him. Don't look— He was already looking at me. Maxwell stood as I approached, which was exactly the kind of gesture he excelled at — the perfect movement, the perfectly timed show of respect. He was in a black suit that probably cost more than three months of my first paycheck, and his dark hair was combed back, and his blue eyes held exactly the right amount of sorrow. Just enough to be convincing. Not so much that it looked theatrical. I had learned, over the past year, to study the gap between what Maxwell showed and what Maxwell was. The gap was enormous. Most people never looked for it. "Daisy." His voice was low, carefully soft. He stepped into the aisle and opened his arms, and because the entire church was watching, because my mother's friends were watching, because the cameras would be waiting outside, I walked into them. His arms closed around me. I stopped breathing. "Don't blame yourself," he murmured into my hair, his hand moving in slow circles on my back. "She wouldn't want that. You know that." I stood very still inside his embrace and thought about all the things I could not say. Not here. Not yet. Then I lifted my head and looked at him, and I let him see — just for one unguarded second, just for him — exactly what was living behind my eyes. Not grief. Not guilt. Promise. Something flickered across his face. A small tightening around the eyes, there and gone before anyone else could catch it. His arms didn't loosen, but his body shifted, almost imperceptibly, like a man who has just heard a sound he cannot identify. Good. "If it weren't for you," I said quietly, the words measured and private between us, "she would still be alive." His jaw moved. "Daisy—" "You're right that I shouldn't blame myself." I stepped back from him with a smile that I aimed carefully at the front pew, where three of Mum's church friends were watching us with wet eyes and clasped hands, moved by what they imagined was a broken family holding each other together. "I don't." I walked past him and took my seat in the front pew. Maxwell stood in the aisle for two seconds longer than he should have. Three months earlier The night that ruined everything started the way a lot of ruinous nights do — with a celebration that had nothing to do with me, an invitation I should have declined, and a glass of champagne I should never have touched. Club Casablanca was the kind of place that existed to remind you of the distance between people who had money and people who were still becoming. Everything was gold and low light and the particular hum of a room full of people who had never once worried about rent. My colleague Tiana had gotten a lead role in a major production and wanted to celebrate, and I was happy for her, genuinely, so I went. I nursed my first glass for almost two hours. The second glass was handed to me by someone I didn't know well enough to question, and I smiled and accepted it because the music was good and the room was warm and I had been working seven days straight and I was tired in the particular way that makes you want to stop being careful for five minutes. That was my mistake. Five minutes of not being careful. By eleven-thirty, I knew something was wrong. It started in my hands — a heaviness that wasn't tiredness, a lag between deciding to move my fingers and actually moving them. Then my vision began to soften at the edges, the lights bleeding into each other like watercolors in rain. I set down my glass. I told myself to stand up. My body took three full seconds to agree. Get out. Right now. Get out. The voice in my head was clear even when nothing else was. I followed it. I pushed through the crowd with my shoulder, murmuring excuse me excuse me excuse me, and I hit the cold night air and I thought: okay. Outside. Good. Call a car. You're fine. Then I heard the footsteps. Two of them, behind me. Not the aimless pace of people heading home — deliberate, tracking, adjusting when I adjusted. I knew without turning around. My body knew before my brain finished the thought. I ran. My heels were completely wrong for running and my legs were already unreliable and I ran anyway, because the alternative had a shape I refused to look at directly. I could hear them gaining. The street was too quiet, the lights too far apart, and I was running out of the ability to stay upright— I fell forward. Into someone. My hands grabbed fabric — an expensive jacket, a broad chest — and I heard myself say help me in a voice I barely recognized as mine. The man looked down at me. Then he looked up, past me, and something in his face changed. He didn't speak. He simply raised one hand, a single controlled gesture, and from the shadows on either side of the street, two men materialized and moved toward my pursuers with the quiet efficiency of people who did this regularly. I felt my knees give. He caught me. Of course he did. He caught me like it was simple, like I weighed nothing, and he carried me somewhere warm and laid me down on something soft, and the last thing I was aware of before the drug pulled me fully under was his hand brushing the hair from my face. Careful. Almost gentle. I held onto his hand. "Don't leave," I whispered. He didn't leave. I woke up to morning light and the specific horror of a ceiling that was not mine. The confusion lasted approximately four seconds. Then memory arrived — fragmented and merciless — and I went completely still, staring upward while my brain assembled the evidence with the detached efficiency of a crime scene investigator who really did not want to know what they were going to find. The arm across my waist. The hotel suite. The expensive, unfamiliar sheets. The events of the previous night arriving in the wrong order, soft-edged and incomplete in the way that made the stomach drop worse than clarity would have. I moved slowly. Carefully. The arm shifted but did not tighten, and I held my breath through every inch until I was standing on the other side of the bed, gathering my things with hands that would not stop shaking. His back was to me. I couldn't see his face. I focused on the door. Almost there. Almost— "Leaving so soon?" I froze. His voice was deep and unhurried, the voice of someone who had all the time in the world. I turned slowly, because there was nothing else to do, and I looked at him for the first time in actual daylight. My first thought, which I hated myself for immediately: he was devastatingly handsome. Dark hair, sharp jaw, blue eyes that were watching me with something that was not quite amusement but was related to it. Mid-forties, maybe. The kind of man that the word powerful was invented to describe. My second thought: I need to leave this room immediately. "Last night was a mistake," I said. My voice came out steadier than I deserved. "I was drugged. I'm sorry." He sat up slowly, unhurried. "There's nothing to be sorry for." I pulled cash from my bag — too much, I knew it was too much, but I needed the transaction to be clear, needed there to be no ambiguity about what this was and what it was not — and I placed it on the nightstand. Something moved across his face. Not offense. Closer to fascination. "Last night," I said, "did not happen." I walked out. The elevator doors opened onto the lobby, and I stepped out, and there — standing at the reception desk in her weekend coat, turning at exactly the wrong moment — was my mother. Julie Morgan. With her kind green eyes and her chipped-nail-polish hands and her expression shifting from surprise to relief to the particular concern that only mothers manufacture. "Daisy! I called you all night—" "I was filming," I said immediately. "My phone died. I'm sorry, Mum." I touched the cross at my throat. "I swear." She looked at me for a long moment. Then her face softened, and she pulled me in, and I hugged her back and closed my eyes and told myself it was over. When I opened them, he was standing across the lobby. The man from the suite. Fully dressed now, jacket on, watching me lie to my mother with an expression of complete calm. He caught my eye. And smiled. He already knew who she was. He had known all along. And Daisy Morgan, who prided herself on reading every room she entered, had walked directly into his.