Chapter Thirty-Five #2
“Step back, Celia. As for my relationship with your sister. It’s real. It’s very real.”
Little did Celia know that Ruby Night had been the turning point for us.
Celia laughed, her controlled, cutesy sound that set my teeth on edge. “Drew, you don’t need to pretend any longer.”
There was a rustling, then a dull thud as one of them landed on furniture.
Is she cornering him?
“I’m not going to ask again. Back up so I can leave.” Drew’s voice was tight with barely restrained anger.
I recognized what was happening. Drew was trapped, and the only way out was brushing past Celia—the exact thing he was trying to avoid.
She’s doing this because I stood up to her. Because she’s losing control.
This was a calculated move. Another thing to take from me, to prove she could. A temper tantrum dressed up as seduction.
I stood by the doorway, able to see in, ready to enter the room and end this farce when Drew spoke again. “And know this … I love your sister. You are a pale, wispy shadow of a person next to her loving vibrancy. I’d never go for someone like you.”
Celia hissed something unintelligible.
I lost my ability to breathe.
We told each other we were falling, but … Drew loved me?
Not the way I’d have preferred hearing it for the first time, but my body gave an excited wiggle despite the circumstances.
He and I desperately needed to talk.
I entered the parlor. Drew hadn’t seen me yet, and Celia had backed him onto a small sofa while she stood over him, caging him in. Her eyes jerked up and then narrowed as her gaze landed on me.
Perfect. Just the audience she was hoping for.
“Let’s not deny our feelings any longer,” Celia said, and then pressed her lips to his.
Drew immediately slid his hands around her waist and lifted her body, setting her aside. “Back the fuck up, Celia.”
Then he turned his head and caught sight of me.
He scrambled off the couch, nearly falling in his haste. “It’s not what you think, Ellie. I swear.” He stood before me, hands outstretched, fear and uncertainty stark in his eyes.
I couldn’t let him suffer and grabbed onto his hands. “I know.”
“Really, I just came to find you. And Celia—” He stopped. “You know?”
“Yeah, I heard most of it, but even if I hadn’t, I trust you.”
Drew pulled me into a big bear hug and let out a relieved sigh. “Thank God. With everything that happened with your ex … I wasn’t sure. Fuck.”
I was kind of surprised by my own certainty, too. Kyle’s betrayal had been devastating, and I’d wondered if I could ever trust someone again.
But this wasn’t the same. Drew had been cornered, had explicitly rejected her several times, and he’d declared his feelings for me.
He would have chosen me even if I wasn’t there to see it. I knew that with absolute clarity.
“You heard everything?” He looked down at me, uncertainty shading his beautiful hazel eyes once more.
I grinned despite the whole shitshow around us. “Yeah, I heard that, too.”
“Well, fuck.” He turned and glared at Celia.
She had a lot to account for.
I stepped out of Drew’s embrace to face my sister. My heart hammered, but my feet stayed planted. For once, I wasn’t running.
“Why, Celia?”
She shrugged, the gesture so casual it was like a slap across my face. “I figured it didn’t matter if the two of you weren’t really dating.”
Liar! The word screamed through my head.
She knew. She’d always known what her actions would do to me.
“But that hasn’t mattered in the past. Look at you and Kyle.
” My voice was steady now, clear. Strong.
“You knew exactly what you were doing tonight with Drew. You were trying to take something else from me. And after everything I did for you.”
Heat flashed across her face—not shame, but anger that I’d dare to call her out.
Good. Let her be angry. I’m done taking her mental and emotional abuse.
“Two years ago, I covered for you,” I continued, my voice rising.
Each word felt like shedding weight I’d carried for far too long.
“I told everyone that Kyle and I had broken up well before the two of you got together. I told people I was happy for you to save your reputation. Yet you still treat me like crap, and like an evil villain you steal my wedding ideas book? How could you?”
“You weren’t using it anyway,” she snarled, her beautiful face twisting into something ugly.
There it was. The cruelty she usually kept wrapped in sugar and smiles when others were present.
I stood my ground, and forced my chin up. “That’s not an answer.”
I will not back down. Not this time. Never again.
“What do you want from me, Ellie?” Her tone was vicious and dripped with contempt.
Her question should’ve made me falter. The old Ellie would have apologized and made herself smaller to make Celia comfortable.
But I wasn’t that Ellie anymore.
“It’s an easy enough question. Why did you steal my ideas, Celia?”
“You want to know why?” She stepped closer, and I caught the flash of something feral in her eyes. She wanted me to flinch, to step back, to give her space like I always did.
I didn’t move. “I do.”
For a moment I thought she wouldn’t answer.
That she’d storm off or deflect or play the victim like she always did, but something in her snapped.
“Six months ago, I showed my followers your book as a joke. A fucking joke.” Her laugh was sharp and mean.
“I couldn’t wait to make fun of your stupidly simple ideas with them, your pathetic attempt at drawings and color swatches.
But the joke was on me … they loved them. ”
The words hit hard like a physical blow.
She was going to mock me to thousands of people? She planned to turn my dreams into cheap entertainment?
“So once again I was supposed to be used for comedy? That’s not okay, Celia.” My voice held strong, my rage underlying each word.
“You think you have it so bad, Ellie? After I showed my fans your book and my post went viral, the reality show Wedding Bells reached out to me, and Kyle proposed that week. And then I told my followers I was archiving the video and thanked them for keeping my book their little secret.”
Holy shit! I had a feeling Kyle was in it for the exposure. He’d always said he wanted more than his job in finance.
“So you’re upset with me because your cruel joke backfired and your fiancé isn’t marrying you for love? And why is that my problem?”
Her eyes flashed. “Excuse me?”
“Every time something good comes into my life you find a way to take it or make it all about you.” The words poured out of me now. “Kyle. My ideas. My boyfriend. Why do you hate me so much?”
Say it. Finally say it out loud.
Once the words were out, I realized how true they were. How long had I been carrying this question, this weight, this desperate need to understand why my sister treated me like an enemy. “When we were little, we were friends. What happened?”
I hated the tears that filled my eyes. I should hate my sister too, but that little girl I’d once been missed the closeness we had shared before everything went wrong.
Celia stomped her foot like a toddler. “You don’t get it. You never have.”
I was stunned by the venom lacing her words, the rawness of it.
I took a step back before I could stop myself.
No. Stay strong.
She pointed at me and shifted so close I had to take a step back. “You were always the sweet one. The good one. The one everyone liked. I was just the sister in a pretty dress with the right smile, and the parents who paraded her around needing to look perfect.”
What?
I had no idea she’d felt this way. All this time, I’d been jealous of her—of the attention she got, the way our parents doted on her. And she’d been … “I wish you’d told—”
Celia’s hand slashed between us, making me flinch. “You get everything without even trying.” She pointed at Drew. “You didn’t even want him. Your relationship was fake, yet here he is declaring his love for you. Somehow you always get what you want.”
Is she serious?
How had my sister created such a twisted version of our shared history?
I got what I wanted because I worked my ass off for it. Because I learned to expect nothing and appreciate everything.
“I have all this pressure to be perfect. You go through life without worrying about that and still come up smelling like roses.”
The words landed like slaps, each one revealing how differently we’d experienced our childhood. Where I saw favoritism, she saw pressure. Where I felt invisible, she felt trapped.
How had we grown up in the same house and learned to view everything so differently?
“How long have you felt like this?” My voice came out softer than I’d intended.
The question hung in the air between us. It didn’t matter that I saw our upbringing through a different lens. It didn’t matter that I’d felt jealous of the relationship she had with our parents. It also didn’t matter that we’d both been damaged by the same people in completely different ways.
I just needed to understand where this all began.
Celia crossed her arms over her chest. “The play.”
“The play?” Acting had always been Celia’s thing, her passion.
“Fourth grade when I got the lead role.”
Now I knew exactly which day she was talking about, but I still didn’t get why. “I wasn’t even in the play. I was working backstage.”
“Exactly. You. Weren’t. In. The. Play. Yet, you were the one everyone surrounded when it was over. Not the lead. You were the one everyone thought was so amazing.”
That day changed everything for both of us.
The memory hit me with startling clarity.
I was in sixth grade and had joined the backstage crew hoping to spend time with my sister since we’d started to grow apart.
The little boy playing the lead opposite of Celia had a meltdown, and I distracted him and helped him calm down.
One of the backdrops started to fall, but I noticed in time to alert the drama teacher.
And when Celia froze and couldn’t remember her lines, I’d whispered them to her from the wings.
“I was just trying to help. I was trying to be close to you again.”
Celia continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “Everyone thought you were such a hero. Even Mom and Dad said you did a good job.”
I also remembered my parents acknowledging me that day—it was so rare to hear any kindness from them.
But I soon realized they said it because my teacher was nearby, and they knew it would look bad if they didn’t.
I think that day marked the beginning of me bending over backwards, trying to be the ‘good girl’ to gain their affection.
We were both broken that day. Just in different ways.
Little had we known that Celia and I shared the moment that shaped the rest of our lives—we’d just walked away with opposite wounds.
“I didn’t know.” My voice cracked again. The weight of all those years pressed down on me—the anger, the hurtful treatment, all because she’d been jealous. All because she thought I had it easier. “Celia, I didn’t know you felt that way.”
And if I had known? Would I have changed anything? That was a hard observation to accept. I don’t know if I was strong enough at the time.
My chest ached with the realization we’d spent over a decade hurting each other, both of us fighting for scraps of love from people incapable of giving it.
“I thought you had everything,” I admitted, my throat ached.
“Mom and Dad’s attention, their pride, their affection.
I would have given anything for them to look at me the way they looked at you.
” Tears spilled down my cheeks. “But it wasn’t real, was it?
The attention came with conditions. With pressure to be perfect. And I got … I got nothing either way.”
We were both starving for attention we should have gotten all along.
Celia’s expression flickered—something vulnerable passing across her face before her walls slammed back up.
“We both lost,” I whispered. “They pitted us against each other, we spent years fighting over their love when neither of us was actually getting it.”
For a moment, I saw a flash of the sister I’d once known. The girl who played dolls with me, who’d let me braid her hair, who’d held my hand on the first day of school.
Was she in there somewhere? Or was she gone forever?
I stood there, shaking with the weight of everything that had been laid bare between us.
At this moment, I had maybe more than an ounce of sympathy for my sister. It couldn’t have been easy thinking that to be loved, you had to be perfect. That any crack in the facade meant losing everything.
But that didn’t excuse what she’d done.
The reality was that as adults, we made choices. We could continue to let our past define us, use it as a shield to hurt or push people away, or allow it to explain away our bad behavior.
That trauma, though, at some point, needed to be dealt with. Or we needed to find a way to not use it as an excuse to make everyone around us miserable. We had to take ownership of our feelings, our actions, our words.
Today, I was doing exactly that.
I would no longer seek my parents approval, my sister’s—or anyone else’s, for that matter.
My mental health, my sanity, my ability to love myself and my life was far more important than the obsessive need I had to win over people who didn’t deserve my love.
I choose me.
Finally, I choose me.
Drew’s arms wrapped around me from behind, and I leaned into their safety, letting him ground me as the trembling slowly subsided.
That’s when I noticed them.
The cameras.
Red lights blinking in the background. At least two of them, positioned just outside the parlor, capturing every word, every expression, every ugly truth Celia had just spewed.
Oh God. This is all being filmed.
My stomach dropped, then steadied.
I had done nothing to be ashamed of. Celia needed to face the consequences of her actions once and for all.
She followed my gaze and her face went white. “No. No, no, no—stop filming!” She whirled toward the crew. “I said stop!”
But they didn’t. The cameras kept rolling.
“Celia.” My voice cut through her panic. When she turned back to me, I saw it—the moment she realized she’d lost control of her own story.
I took a breath and looked at my sister—really looked at her—maybe for the first time in years. Not the golden child. Not the influencer. Not the bride. Just Celia. Small, petty, desperate Celia, who’d built her life making sure she was the sun and I was her shadow.
“I’m done,” I said simply. “I’m done covering for you. I’m done protecting you from consequences. I’m done making myself small so you can be big. You want to know what happened to us? You chose this. Every single time you chose cruelty over kindness, you chose this.”
I turned and walked back to Drew, my hands shaking but my spine straight.
I did it. I finally stood up to her.
We’d been done for a long time. I just hadn’t been strong enough to admit it until now.