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“Did he clear his name?”
“Yes,” Aura said. “The claims fell apart, and the Inferno kept him.”
“Is that why he’s so guarded about cameras?”
Neither answered.
I remembered Ryan saying Milwaukee taught him to check whether anyone had a camera. I’d treated it like another sharp joke, never knowing it had teeth buried inside a conference room where photographs of me had been spread across a table.
“How long have you known?”
Bliss’s eyes closed.
“How long?”
“A few months,” she said.
The answer entered quietly, but everything inside me heard it. “You knew before we came here.”
“Yes.”
“Who told you?”
“Cade and Easton,” Aura answered. “They knew your father would be here for the wedding. They wanted us prepared if Lance approached Ryan, said something, or tried to create another situation.”
“You knew while I planned this weekend.”
“Yes.”
“You knew while I told you I was going to win Ryan back.”
Bliss’s tears spilled over.
“You helped me choose what to wear. You listened while I planned how to sit beside him, touch him, and show him I wasn’t ashamed anymore. You watched me treat Ryan’s resistance like something I could overcome if I gave him enough proof that I’d changed.”
“We never told you to push him,” Aura said.
“You didn’t stop me.”
“Would you have stopped?”
“I don’t know.”
“We didn’t know how to warn you without telling a story that belonged to Ryan.”
“Lance used my body, my treatment, my relationship, and my name to attack him. Don’t you dare tell me that story doesn’t belong to me.”
“I didn’t say it doesn’t belong to you.”
“You decided I didn’t get to know it.”
“We were trying to respect Ryan’s privacy.”
“His privacy? What about mine?”
Bliss covered her mouth, but a sob escaped through her fingers.
I looked between them. “Did my mother know?”
