Chapter 6 - Someone Had Stolen You
Bigger.
That word opened something under my feet.
I had thought the story was Derek’s violence.
The apartment.
The bank card.
Suzanne.
His family.
But Derek was only the hand closest to my throat.
Leonard Pike was the pattern behind him.
Three days later, in a protected interview room downtown, Detective Sloan introduced me to a woman I had mourned for thirty years without remembering her face.
Elise Hart Bennett sat in a wheelchair near the window.
Older.
Thinner.
Alive.
Her blonde hair was short now, streaked with silver. One side of her face did not move as easily as the other. Her hands trembled in her lap.
But her eyes—
I knew them.
Not because I remembered them.
Because I saw them in the mirror every morning.
I stopped in the doorway.
She pressed one hand to her mouth.
“Skylar.”
My name broke apart in her voice.
I could not move.
All the anger came first.
That surprised me.
Not joy.
Not relief.
Anger.
“You’re alive.”
She closed her eyes.
“Yes.”
“You let me think you were dead.”
Tears slid down her face.
“I did.”
“Why?”
Detective Sloan stepped back but remained in the room.
Elise looked at me as if every word cost breath.
“Because Leonard Pike told me if I tried to reach you, Calder would find you. Then he told Calder you died with me. He kept us all apart.”
“Calder Vance?”
Her face crumpled.
“Yes.”
“The developer?”
“Your father.”
The room tilted.
I sat before my knees decided for me.
My father.
Calder Vance.
The man in the photograph.
The man whose company built the tower where Derek had tried to kill me.
The man who should have been myth, villain, stranger, answer.
He was just a man in a hallway looking at my coffee-burned cheek with devastation in his eyes.
“I don’t know you,” I said.
He nodded.
“No.”
“You don’t get to walk in like a father because someone found paperwork.”
“I know.”
“You don’t get to make this about your grief.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t get to buy your way into my life.”
His face tightened.
Then he nodded again.
“I already tried money without presence,” he said. “It was not fatherhood.”
That sentence stopped me.
Not because it fixed anything.
Because it admitted something true without asking me to comfort him.
He continued.
“I was told you died with Elise. Leonard Pike brought me ashes, a death certificate, and medical records. All false. I believed him because grief made me stupid and money made me arrogant enough to think official paper was truth.”
Elise covered her face.
Calder’s voice cracked.
“When I found the trust irregularities, I thought first that someone had stolen from me. Then I learned someone had stolen you.”
I looked away.
Stolen you.
The words were too large.
Too simple.
Too late.
Detective Sloan said, “Skylar, you don’t have to speak to him today.”
I almost laughed.
Everyone kept telling me what I did not have to do after thirty years of choices made without me.
“I need to know about the apartment,” I said.
Calder nodded.
“Ask.”
“Did you buy it?”
“No. You did, through the trust distribution your aunt accepted on your behalf after your mother’s presumed death. You chose it. You signed. You paid what you believed was yours.”
“But the money came from you.”
“From the trust I created before you were born. It was always yours.”
“And Leonard knew?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why Derek wanted it.”
May you like
“That’s part of why.”
“What’s the other part?”
