Chapter 20 After All These Years
The next day my phone rang just after lunch, the Berkeley area code flashing across the screen.
I stepped into an empty conference room before answering.
“Ashley Richards,” I said.
“Ashley, this is Detective Holt from Berkeley PD. I wanted to update you on the case.”
“I’m listening.”
“We managed to obtain a discarded water bottle from Marissa Richards,” he said. “Our lab pulled a DNA sample from it. The results came back this morning.”
I gripped the edge of the table
“It’s a match,” Holt continued. “The DNA on the bottle matches the DNA from the bite mark on Ines’s arm. That’s our primary comparison sample. It ties Marissa directly to the crime scene.”
I sank slowly into a chair.
“So… it was her.”
“Yes,” Holt said. “Marissa was taken into custody this morning in Riverton.”
“Did she talk at all?”
“She refused to make a statement without an attorney, which is her right.” he said. “But we have enough evidence to hold her, and we’ve already taken an official DNA sample for confirmation.”
I swallowed. “So she’s… staying in custody?”
“Yes,” Holt said. “She’s being held without bail at this stage. The judge agreed there’s a serious flight risk and substantial evidence.”
He paused, then added, “The original DNA we compared the bottle sample to came from the bite mark on your mother’s arm. That ties Marissa directly to physical contact during the murder.”
“And the motive?”
“Given that she was your father’s mistress, we can argue she had a reason to eliminate the competition,” Holt said. “It strengthens the case significantly.”
I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to steady my breathing. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“It’s been a long time coming,” he said gently. “But we finally have something solid.”
He continued, “In the next few days, Marissa will be transferred to Berkeley. That’s where the crime happened, and that’s where the case will be tried.”
“How long…” My voice caught. “How long will this take?”
“A while,” he said honestly. “Over a year, most likely, before trial.”
A year. After all this time, the case was finally moving.
Holt’s voice softened. “I have a good feeling about this. The evidence is strong. I believe we’ll get a conviction.”
I closed my eyes, letting the words sink in. “Thank you. Really.”
“One more thing,” he added. “I’ll notify your mother’s parents myself. They’ve been calling us every year from France, asking for updates, begging us to reopen the file. They deserve to hear this from me.”
My chest ached. “They do.”
“We’ll stay in touch,” Holt said.
“Okay. Thank you, Detective.”
When the call ended, I just sat there, staring at the silent phone in my hand. My chest felt tight, but not in a bad way. More like something inside me finally loosened after years of being wound too tight to breathe.
My mother was finally getting justice.
After all this time. After all the dead ends and the silence and the unanswered questions.
Deep down, I had always known it wasn’t some stranger. It was either Marissa or Brandon. It had to be. There was no universe where my mother’s murder was random. Not with the way things were left in that house.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, stood up, and dialed my father.
He answered on the second ring. “Ashley?”
“Did you know?”
A pause. “Know what?”
“They arrested her.”
“Who?”
My voice sounded steadier than I felt. “Marissa. They arrested her this morning. They have DNA. It matches the bite mark on Mom’s arm.”
Silence stretched across the line.
Then a broken exhale. “Oh God… I’ve been at work since early morning. I had to go in because there were problems in the company. I didn’t know.”
“You know this is your fault,” I said quietly. “Mom is dead because of you. You let a snake into our lives.”
“Ashley, please…”
“What does it feel like,” I cut in, “to realize you’ve been living with Mom’s murderer for years? That you married her. Slept next to her. Built a life with her.”
He made a sound I had never heard from him before. A choked, ugly sob.
I didn’t stop.
“Did you know she was related to my mother?”
“What? No. That can’t be true.”
“Well it is. DNA doesn’t lie. She was her half-sister.”
“She never told—”
“You know she did something to Elena too,” I cut in again. “You know it. Now Evan has to grow up without a mother. Just like I did.”
Brandon broke. I could hear it through the phone, raw sobs tearing out of him, the kind that came from somewhere deep and hollowed out.
Then his breathing hitched and I heard the faint scrape of a chair.
“I… I need to go home,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “Evan will be home from school soon. He…”
His voice cracked on the last word.
Then the line went dead.
For a moment I just stood there, staring at my phone, listening to the silence he left behind. A man unraveling on the other end of the line, and nothing left in his house except the consequences he had built for himself.
And while Brandon was finally facing the truth, Apple was doing the exact opposite.
She was still pretending she could come back from all of it, as if there was any coming back from that high school graduation exposé video resurfacing.
Apple posted a response video where she claimed everything was fake, that it had been “proven fake years ago,” back when the clip first surfaced at her own party.
Then she went further and accused me directly. Said I was evil and out to get her, that I had always hated her.
Her comments were disabled.
She did not allow anyone to challenge her version of the story.
After that, she started posting old photos, a curated nostalgia tour. And of course she included her fourteenth birthday picture, the one where I was in the frame with a bad acne flare. Subtle as a brick.
But Amy didn’t let it slide.
She posted an old clip from Apple’s Juilliard days, back before Apple was thrown out.
A casual party video, someone filming the room, catching the exact moment Apple shoved an empty wheelchair down a staircase.
The owner had been carried downstairs earlier to use the bathroom, leaving the chair at the top of the steps.
A double amputee. The chair was destroyed.
The comments exploded under the video, because the burner account Amy used didn’t disable them.
That incident had been a mystery for years. The community had even raised money to buy the owner a new chair. No one had ever known how the original one was damaged.
Until now.
People dug up the old GoFundMe. Internet sleuths connected every thread. Suddenly, every drama channel had fresh ammunition.
Then former Juilliard students started speaking up.
They said Apple was a mean girl. That she had not left the school by choice.
She had been expelled. They said she had slipped laxatives into a competitor’s drink so she could win a competition.
That was why she had been thrown out, not because she “chose a different path,” like she had told her followers.
With every new expose, there were fewer people defending her in the comments. And more people are demanding that she be canceled. That she disappear from the internet entirely.
Fame and popularity had always mattered more to Apple than anything else. The numbers, the followers, the headlines, the constant validation. She needed it the way other people needed food or sleep. Without it, she withered.
And I was going to take it all from her.
I watched her meltdown unfold with a kind of quiet fascination.
Every denial she posted, every desperate attempt to rewrite the narrative, how she tried to paint herself as the victim, it all made her look more unhinged.
She didn’t even realize it. She thought she was fighting back. But she hadn’t even hit the bottom yet.
Amy still had plenty of ammunition. Years’ worth. And she wasn’t dumping it all at once. She released things slowly, letting each scandal burn just long enough to dominate the internet before dropping the next one.
Every time Apple tried to claw her way back up, another piece of her past surfaced. Another lie exposed. Another person came forward. Another thread unraveled.
I wanted her to lose her mind. I wanted her to feel the same slow, suffocating panic she once inflicted on me. In another life, she had chipped away at my sanity piece by piece, and now I was watching the cracks form in hers. It was almost poetic.
She was going to fall further.
Because I wasn’t done.