MY RUIN: In Love With My Step-Uncle-Chapter 52 - Fifty-Two: Through the Pages of Memory

Chapter 52: Chapter Fifty-Two: Through the Pages of Memory

//CLARA//

I did not remember climbing the stairs.

One moment I was pressed against the corridor wall, Aunt Cornelia’s words still ringing in my ears—She will be joining us for dinner tomorrow evening—and the next I was in my room, my back against the door, my breath coming in ragged gasps that did not seem to belong to me.

Adelaide Chase.

The name echoed in my skull like an alarm I could not stop ringing.

I crossed to the wardrobe before I could think better of it, my hands already reaching for the hidden compartment behind my winter silks. My fingers closed around the worn leather. I sank onto the edge of the bed and flipped through pages.

But as I scanned Eleanor’s handwriting, my hands began to shake.

I had read this thing back in my time, huddled in a dusty attic with a flashlight and a sense of morbid curiosity. I flipped forward, past the blank pages, searching for the memory burning in my skull. The announcement. The society pages. Adelaide Chase’s name printed in cold, permanent ink.

Right. Linear time was a bitch. This diary had not been written yet because Eleanor had not written it yet. Because I was Eleanor now, currently living the nightmare that created it. But the words were burned into my brain, a file saved in a mind that did not belong in 1879.

I closed my eyes. The undated entry scrolled behind my eyelids like a death sentence.

"The announcement was stark: ’Mr. Casimir Guggenheim is pleased to announce his forthcoming marriage to Miss Adelaide Chase of Boston.’ The river outside my window does not look cold. It looks like an answer."

I shivered, a cold sweat breaking out under my corset. I stared at the blank pages where it should have been written, my heart hammering. Adelaide Chase was coming to dinner tomorrow. In Eleanor’s original timeline, that name led to an announcement, a broken heart, a winter that never ended.

"Forgive me, my Casimir, for loving you only in whispers, when I should have loved you in thunder."

The line felt like a brand. Eleanor had died in a whisper.

I was not a whisper. I was a goddamn hurricane.

I already had my own handwriting in here, messy and chaotic, nothing like her poetic angsty cursive. Eleanor wrote like she was apologizing for taking up space. I wrote like I was claiming it—unapologetically.

My hand moved toward the inkwell before I had consciously decided to write. The pen felt heavy and foreign, but I needed to write this down. I needed to make it real. I needed to carve the truth into pages that Eleanor had left waiting for someone like me to fill.

—Adelaide Chase is coming to dinner. Aunt Cornelia’s doing. Casimir did not know until tonight.

The nib hovered over the punctuation mark.

—But this time, the ending is mine.

A knock shattered the silence.

I slammed the diary shut, my heart launching into my throat. The inkwell wobbled. A dark droplet spilled across the desk, but I did not stop to clean it. My hands were already shoving the diary back into its hiding place, already smoothing my skirts, already forcing my face into something that was not sheer, naked panic.

The knock came again, and then his voice.

"Clara."

Casimir.

I pressed my palm flat against the wardrobe door, willing my heart to slow, my breathing to steady.

He does not know, I told myself. He does not know what I was writing. He does not know what I am trying to rewrite.

I crossed to the door and opened it.

He stood in the corridor, already in his evening clothes, his hair disheveled in that way it got when he had been running his hands through it.

The gaslight behind him carved shadows into the hollows of his face. For a moment, he looked less like the man who had demolished Aunt Cornelia with words and more like someone who had just realized he had been fighting the wrong war.

He did not speak. His gaze moved from my face to the desk behind me, where the ink had pooled and dried on the wood. Then his eyes dropped to my hand, still pressed against my skirts. A dark smudge stained my palm, caught in the lines of my skin like evidence.

I curled my fingers into a fist, but it was too late. He had already seen.

For a moment, something flickered in his expression—curiosity, perhaps, but then it was gone in a blink.

"May I come in?" His voice was rough.

I stepped aside and let him in.

He moved past me slowly, as if entering required permission he was still not sure he had been granted. I closed the door behind him and turned the lock. The soft click of the latch seemed louder than it should have been.

I crossed the distance between us before he could speak. My arms found their way around his neck, and I pulled him down into a kiss.

Casimir did not resist. He groaned into my mouth, his hands finding my waist and crushing me against him as he savored the contact with a sweet, passionate intensity. It was the kiss of a man who was starving, a man who had spent the last hour being told he had to eat ash for the rest of his life.

I pulled back just an inch, my breath hitching, my thumb tracing the sharp line of his jaw. I looked him in the eye, searching for the lie.

"You look like you have just seen a ghost, Casimir. Are you going to tell me why?"

His hands tightened on my waist, just for a moment, then relaxed.

I wanted to see if he would tell me. If he would trust me with the truth about Adelaide Chase, or if he would let the bomb drop tomorrow night without warning, thinking he was protecting me from a blow I already knew was coming while I was busy trying to figure out which fork to use.

The marriage contract with Bartholomew was dead. We had crossed lines that could not be uncrossed. Everything had changed drastically from its original timeline.

"We will be expecting company for dinner tomorrow," he finally said.

He pulled back just enough to frame my face in his large hands. His expression was unreadable, his eyes gray and tired, but there was something else there too. Something that looked like fear, though he would never call it that.

"And I want you to behave... as yourself." He paused, the air between us crackling. "I want you to be Clara."

Two things I had learned to read about him like a map.

When the situation was delicate, when he was trying to protect me from something, he called me Eleanor. Eleanor was the ward, the responsibility, the woman he was supposed to protect. But when he wanted chaos, when he wanted me, when he stopped pretending there was anything proper between us, he called me Clara. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"As myself? You are giving me permission to be a menace at your dinner table?"

I kept my face still, my voice light, though my heart was already racing.

Something flickered in his eyes. Relief, maybe, that I was not asking more questions. Or guilt, that he was not giving me the answers I deserved.

"I am giving you permission to be exactly who you are," he said. "I would not survive anything less."