MY EVIL STEPFATHER

CHAPTER THREE: THE WOLF AT THE DINNER TABLE

DAISY'S POV

I sat with my phone in my hand for a long time after my mother hung up.

The restaurant lobby moved around me — staff gliding past, a couple laughing near the entrance, the low murmur of money being spent comfortably — and I sat completely still in the middle of it like something had reached into my chest and unplugged the mechanism that made my lungs work automatically.

Maxwell Barrett.

He had called my mother before I even made it to the ground floor. Before I had finished walking out of his private dining room, before the elevator doors had fully closed behind me, he had already dialed her number. Already introduced himself. Already made her feel chosen.

The word she had used. Chosen.

I knew, with the particular certainty of someone who had just watched a magician reveal half his trick, that he had chosen that word deliberately with her. That he had studied my mother the way a locksmith studies a lock — identifying the mechanism, locating the weakness, applying precisely calibrated pressure until something clicked open.

My mother was warm and hopeful and she had been alone for a long time.

Maxwell Barrett had identified that in approximately one conversation.

I stood up. I walked out of the restaurant into the evening air and I called Sunny.

She picked up on the second ring.

"He's already contacted my mother," I said.

A pause. Then, quietly: "Daisy—"

"How long has he known about her? How long has he been planning this?"

"I don't know."

"Sunny."

"I genuinely don't know." Her voice was careful. "But listen to me. You cannot go to your mother right now and tell her what happened. You have no proof of anything except a one-night — except last night, which she cannot know about. If you go to her now, while she's feeling this way about him, she won't believe you. It will look like jealousy. Like you trying to protect your own relationship with her."

Every word was accurate. That was the worst part. I pressed my free hand against the cold stone wall of the building and breathed.

"So what do I do?" I asked. Not helplessly — I didn't do helpless. Strategically. A genuine question with a required answer.

"Go to dinner on Friday," Sunny said. "Meet him in front of her. Watch him. And find something I can use."

I hung up and stared at the street for a moment.

Fine, I thought. Fine. If this is the game, then I'll learn to play it better than he does.

I had no idea, standing there on that pavement, how long it would take me to understand just how wrong I was.

Friday arrived like a verdict.

I spent too long getting dressed, which was not like me. I kept changing — too formal made it look like I was performing, too casual made it look like I didn't take the threat seriously, and everything I put on felt like a costume for the wrong role. Eventually I chose a deep green dress, simple and structured, the kind of thing that said I am not trying to impress anyone while still being impossible to dismiss.

Mum's apartment smelled like her — warm spices and something sweet from the oven and the particular soft scent of her perfume that I had been able to identify since I was five years old. I stood in the doorway for a moment just breathing it in, trying to absorb enough of it to last through whatever the next few hours were going to be.

She appeared from the kitchen in her nicest apron, her blonde hair pinned up in a way she only did for occasions, and her face when she saw me was so open and happy that my chest physically ached.

"You came," she said, like she hadn't been entirely sure I would.

"Of course I came." I kissed her cheek. "You look beautiful, Mum."

She waved a hand, but she was smiling. "I made the lamb. And the rice with the herbs you like. And I was trying a new sauce that he mentioned he enjoyed, apparently his housekeeper used to make something similar and I thought—" She stopped, laughing at herself. "Listen to me. I'm rambling."

"You're happy," I said.

She looked at me then, really looked. "I am," she said softly. "Is that alright?"

The question broke something small and quiet inside me, because she was asking permission. My mother, who had given up a decade of her own happiness to raise me and support me and believe in me through every setback — she was standing in her kitchen asking if she was allowed to feel good about something.

"More than alright," I said. And I meant it, in a way that made the rest of the evening harder.

Because what I wanted for my mother was real. It was just that the man walking through her door forty minutes later was not.

He knocked at seven exactly.

I was on the couch, pretending to look at my phone. I heard Mum's heels on the floor, heard the door, heard her voice lift into that particular register — warm and slightly breathless — and then I heard his.

Low. Unhurried. Already at home.

"These are for you." A pause — flowers, I assumed. "You look wonderful, Julie."

My mother's laugh was the most painful sound I had heard all week.

I stood when they came into the room. Maxwell was holding a bouquet of cream roses — her favorite, which meant he had found that out somehow — and he was wearing a charcoal jacket over a dark shirt, and he looked exactly like the kind of man a woman like my mother would believe in completely.

His eyes found mine immediately.

"Daisy." He smiled. Warm, practiced, and aimed at me like a blade wrapped in silk. "It's wonderful to finally meet you properly."

Properly. The word was perfect. It acknowledged our previous meetings without referencing them. It positioned everything that came before as informal, accidental, irrelevant. It was the kind of precision that took either training or instinct, and I suspected, with Maxwell, it was both.

"Likewise," I said. My voice came out smooth as his. I was a trained actress. If he wanted performance, I could perform.

Something flickered in his eyes. Recognition, maybe. The acknowledgment of an opponent who had just shown their first card.

Mum bustled back from putting the roses in water, and then we were three people sitting down to dinner in a small apartment, and every moment of it was a kind of theatre.

He was extraordinary to watch, and I hated that. The way he listened to my mother with his full attention, asking questions that built on her previous answers, remembering small details she had mentioned and circling back to them. The way he laughed at exactly the right moments. He had clearly spent time around women who needed to feel heard, and he had learned to simulate it with a precision that was almost clinical.

Almost. If you were not looking for it.

I was looking for it.

"Daisy," he said, turning to me midway through the main course, his voice acquiring that warmth that was somehow worse than coldness, "your mother tells me you've had some exciting projects lately."

"A few," I said.

"I hear the industry can be quite difficult to navigate. All those moving pieces." A pause. "It must be a relief to have people in your corner."

The words were innocent. The eyes were not.

"I manage," I said.

Mum looked between us, sensing something she couldn't name. "Maxwell actually knows some people in the industry," she said helpfully. "Isn't that a coincidence? I told him you might have people in common."

"Such a small world," I said.

Maxwell smiled into his wine glass.

The meal continued. I ate without tasting anything. I watched him perform and catalogued every detail — the precise way he angled his attention, the small touches on my mother's hand, the way he positioned himself physically to include her and subtly exclude me from the warmest parts of the conversation without ever doing anything I could point to directly.

He was doing it on purpose. I knew he was doing it on purpose. And I could not say a single word.

Then Mum stood to clear the plates, and Maxwell stood too — of course he did — and said he would help, and she laughed and told him absolutely not, he was a guest, and disappeared into the kitchen.

The room contracted.

He sat back down slowly. The performance didn't drop exactly — it adjusted. Like a camera shifting focus.

"You did well," he said quietly. "I wasn't sure you'd come."

"I wasn't going to let you be alone with her," I said, equally quiet.

"That's going to be difficult to maintain long-term." He reached for his wine with the ease of someone completely comfortable in a home that was not his. "I'm very patient, Daisy. And your mother is very—" he considered his word carefully— "open."

My hand tightened around my fork.

"I will tell her," I said. "Everything."

"Will you." Not a question. "And which part will you start with?"

I said nothing.

"Because the part that involves you," he continued, soft and precise as a scalpel, "is the part that breaks her first. Before it breaks me at all."

He was right. He knew he was right. The worst part was not that he had thought of it — it was that I had too, lying awake at three in the morning since Tuesday.

I set my fork down carefully on the table.

"I will find a way," I said.

"I look forward to watching you try." He looked toward the kitchen door, from which my mother's humming was just audible. "She really is lovely. You got your strength from her, I think."

The cruelty of the compliment was its sincerity. He meant it. And that made it more threatening than anything he could have said.

Mum came back in with dessert, and his face rearranged itself instantly, and he stood to take the tray from her, and she protested, and he insisted, and she let him — and the small domestic ease of it made my stomach turn.

I excused myself after dessert. Headache, I said. Early morning. I kissed my mother's cheek and held on for a second longer than usual and she patted my hand and told me to rest.

Maxwell walked me to the door.

Of course he did.

"Goodnight, Daisy," he said. Quiet enough that Mum couldn't hear. His hand moved to the door frame above my head, not touching me, just present. Just close enough.

I looked up at him.

"This ends," I said. Just that.

He leaned down, just slightly, and said the four words with the absolute calm of a man who had never once doubted himself:

"It hasn't started yet."

I walked out into the cold night and pulled my coat around me and did not look back.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from an unknown number.

She showed me a photo of you at sixteen. You looked just like her. I can see why she's so proud.

I stopped walking.

He had her phone. Or access to it. He had been through her photographs.

He had been planning this longer than I thought.

Much, much longer.

Daisy stood on the pavement outside her mother's building and understood, for the first time, the full geometry of the trap. It had no visible walls. No locks she could point to. Just Maxwell Barrett, patient and smiling, already inside every room that mattered.