Page 228 of Ruin My Life
So I switch tactics.
I start digging into Isabella instead—her records, her parents, any link that might unravel this mess.
Because Connor Vaughn doesn’t exist.
But maybeheisn’t the only one who lied.
Maybe I didn’t know Isabella Harrison and her family as well as I thought.
They were always well-off, from what I remember—and the records back it up. They owned a townhouse in Cobble Hill before relocating out of New York. Old money. Successful careers on the stock exchange. Polished and private. The kind of people who didn’t like questions. Who didn’t like people like me.
I met Isabella by chance at a bar near her campus. She was in City Tech’s art program—kind, fiery, too damn smart for her own good. Her parents hated me from the jump. And why wouldn’t they? I was a broke punk running with the Songbirds. No future. No plan. Just a teenage obsession to keep my mother alive and a half-rotted mattress in a shoebox apartment to crash on at the end of every night.
But Isabella… she made me think about the possibility of a future for the very first time.
Not necessarily a future with her in it—we were too different, even then. But she made mewantone.
And when things started to sour with Xander—when I saw just how deep the rot in the gang went—her voice was the only thing I could still hear through the noise.
When she was killed, her parents blamed me. Rightly so.
If she’d never met me, she wouldn’t have been a target. If she hadn’t loved me, maybe she’d still be breathing.
They held a funeral, and I went—but I didn’t dare get close. I stood under the trees by the cemetery’s iron fence, half in the shade, watching them lower her into the earth. Watching her parents weep beside that polished mahogany box.
There were so many people. Friends. Professors. Family. Too many faces to register.
But I remember how wrong I felt there—like a stain bleeding through their perfect, grieving world.
Except… I wasn’t the only one lurking at the edges.
There was another figure. A man. Distant but fixed in place.
He stood near a stone angel, half-eclipsed in shadow. Black suit. Long black hair pulled back in a low ponytail. Hands buried in his pockets. Still. Just watching.
I didn’t see his face. Or maybe I did, but I didn’tseeit—didn’t clock it as important. At the time, I just thought how much his hair looked like Isabella’s. Thought it was my grief conjuring ghosts.
Connor used to have long hair. Before he shaved it off out of he blue six months ago.
Could that have been him?
Standing there the whole time?
Watching me watch her go into the ground?
I switch tracks again—digging into Isabella’s parents this time. Looking for a brother. A son. Anything.
But there’s nothing. Not at first. Not without Lee or Brie to carve open the locked files. I’m fast, but not fast enough. And I don’t have the time to brute-force firewalls when we’re this close.
Still, I keep digging. Pushing. Scraping.
Then—
I find something.
A single record. Buried deep under legal filings and dry administrative statements.
It’s a court document—A lawyer's summary.
