Chapter 24

*Ryder*

"It was a setup." I'd barely made it through the door after hours spent running around to get here, and this was Mom's greeting.

"What're you talking about, Mom? What was a setup?"

"This whole thing, everything. It was all a setup." Being here in front of her, I saw that the panic in her voice was nothing compared to the fear in her eyes.

My mom has this habit of pacing back and forth, waving her arms around frantically when she's stressed. She was doing that now only at warped speed. For a minute, I almost thought she was on something, but this wasn't that look. I know what mom looks like high, and this wasn't it.

She kept rambling about lies and conspiracies and blaming herself for believing the wrong people, and I still didn't know what she was talking about. I was too tired and, frankly, freaked out myself to have the patience she obviously needed.

"You're not making any sense, Mom. Now stop pacing and tell me what the hell is going on."

"Your marriage, your wife, her family, the whole thing, they set you up, they lied to everyone." I took a minute to process what she was saying, but her words seemed to be going in one ear and out the other.

I still wasn't sure what she was trying to say. I suspected that there was something shady going on, but that's as far as I got in my thinking because I had no proof other than the sketchy thoughts I'd get here and there during detox.

"Mom, I know you don't like Janie, that you two had some sort of falling out while I was high off my ass, but that's no reason to accuse her and her family of whatever it is that you're implying, especially when there's no proof to back it up."

"Listen to me." Mom grabbed me by the shoulders and looked up at me from her much shorter height. "She never loved you; this whole thing is just crazy, and it's freaking me out. These people are not human."

Uh-uh, if this isn't drugs, then what the hell has gotten into her? No, that's not fair. Before she got hooked on drugs, she was a bit erratic in nature, but I'd somehow blocked those years out after everything that came after, so this was the first time I saw a reminder of the way she used to be.

Mom gets frazzled easily, always did. The world may see her as the well-to-do mother of a pop star, but before she became that, she was just another teenage mom who'd gone off the rails for a few years before my fame threw her into the spotlight.

No one ever thinks about the fact that there's no training for anyone in her position, neither do they think about the fact that someone who's not fond of making the best decisions in life is now given the keys to the city, so to speak. I'm not sure what makes them think that she'd become a neurosurgeon all of a sudden just because her son is Ryder Sumner.

I say all of that to say that most things that come out of mom's mouth should be taken with a grain of salt. "Do you have proof of what you're saying? And what exactly is it that you're saying? Who set me up with what?" She took my hand and dragged me over to the table where she had a mountain of papers and folders laid out.

"Look, someone sent me these. At first, I thought it was a hoax. That's why I didn't say anything to you right away. But I had it checked out. Elena never cheated on you on that trip, and none of the other things that they said were true." It took a second for the weight of her words to sink into my gut, and then I fell back against the counter in shock.

My body felt as if all the wind had been knocked out of me, and I just stared at her in disbelief. Those few words spoken in her anger rocked my whole existence and made a mockery of the last five years of my life. I wanted to doubt her; I needed to for my own sanity.

"What the hell are you saying, Mom?" My voice shook with nerves and thinly restrained anger. I wanted her to grin, to crack a smile, and tell me she was kidding. Then I could tell her what a poor joke it was, call her out on her shit, and move on to what she really called me here for.

But even as I thought it, as my mind tried to find any reason for her to tell me this messed up shit, I knew that she believed what she was saying. She'd learned a long time ago not to lie to me, and I knew very well that she wouldn't play around like that when it came to Elena. ‘Tell me!"

"I'm waiting for you to calm down first, baby. It's bad. It's really bad."

"I'm calm, mom. Now tell me what you're saying." I braced myself as if expecting a blow and watched her swallow hard and open and close her mouth twice before the words came spilling out.

"I'm saying that your wife is a snake. She and her friends planned this whole thing." I barely heard her over the buzzing in my ears. I'd been trying to come to terms with all of this on my own during my time in the desert.

One of the things that had come back to me in bits and pieces was the reason for my hasty wedding. The anger never left me, and neither did the reason for that anger, though things had grown a bit hazy over the years. The one thing that had stuck with me, no matter what, was the fact that Elena had cheated on me while away on a trip with her friends.

That is the story that had been told to me and the reason why I'd treated her the way I had. Even when I doubted the truth in those words, I still made myself accept them. Otherwise, I'd have wronged her egregiously, and that's not something I had been ready or willing to live with.

But now, as I looked at the proof in her hands, I had no other alternative than to accept it. "Do you know why I believe this? Because Reggie found the same thing. It's only after he went digging that I received this anonymously in the mail. Someone he talked to must've got spooked and decided to come clean; I don't know, I just know that we've got to fix this.

What she had were printouts of conversations between Janie, Mary, Noel, and Nicole, going back and forth for weeks, even months. They were first hashing out their plan and then laughing at Elena and congratulating themselves when their plot bore fruit.

Now, I know these things can be faked and manipulated, but for some reason, I believed it without question because this is exactly the kind of people they are, especially Mary and her spawn. But Janie? As certifiable as she is, this was a stretch.

I didn't gather much at a glance, so I'll have to take my time when my head is no longer hot and go over everything, but what Mom had highlighted was more than enough to make me lose my shit. The four of them had screwed me over royally. Not just me but the love of my life. The woman I would die for. They'd used me to hurt her, and what's most abhorrent about the whole thing is that I believed them. I never gave her a chance.

"But why?" I shook my head as I read the messages over and over, focusing on the most pertinent points. It was like a blueprint for sabotage. The worst part is that if I had asked Elena outright, I'd have believed her if she told me that it wasn't true, but I never gave her the chance because the night I heard about her cheating and was given proof, I'd gone on a bender and stayed there for the next four and a half years.

Mom rifled through the folders on the table and pressed something into my hands. I wasn't sure what I was looking at in the beginning, all I saw were pictures of a much younger me, but nothing about them added up to anything.

"What am I looking at, Mom? What am I supposed to be seeing?" The photos were marked with dates and places, but I couldn't see what that had to do with anything. Some of the images were of Elena and me, especially when we first started dating, but again, there was nothing suspicious about them, nothing to make my mother freak out the way she was doing now.

"Look at the evidence in your hands. She's been obsessed with you since she was a kid. This whole thing is a setup, and we did Elena wrong." She pointed out a younger Janie in the background of each and every one of the pictures in my hands. I felt something cold slither down my stomach, and my knees grew weak. I had to reach out and hold onto the chair to keep myself upright.

"Were these pictures doctored, Mom?"

"No, remember I told you that Reggie wanted to do a thorough investigation before giving us anything? He looked into everything; here, look, this is the proof. He matched dates, went back into Janie's social media posts, found old friends of hers, even going back to high school, and they were more than happy to talk because none of them liked her. She's not a nice person. She made this whole thing up with the help of Mary and her daughters, along with your manager and that Matt guy. Her dad also helped her, but I guess you can't fault him for that. He is her dad, after all."

I felt sick to my stomach, and for a moment there, I thought I was going to throw up. My eyes became blurry, and my knees were too weak to walk. But I felt like running. The pain in my heart felt almost like the day I first heard about her betrayal, that searing pain that I never want to experience again in my life. "Oh, my sweet Elena, what have I done?" What the fuck have I done?

"What're you going to do?"

"I have to go to her. I have to explain." Mom nodded her head in agreement as I started heading for the door, but I stopped short when I got there.

"What? Why did you stop?"

"I can't go to her like this, not right now. She deserves better."

"What do you mean?"

"I've always given her the worst of me. I was too young and dumb back then to realize, but after all this, I know what I want, what I've always wanted, but this time I should be the one to do the heavy lifting. I won't go to her unless I'm one hundred percent what she wants, what she's always wanted."

"And what's that? I don't understand. I thought she always loved you."

"Yes, she loves the good parts of me, but you have to admit that for a time there, my bad outweighed the good. And even though she stood by me through it all, I can't ask her to go through that again." Because I don't deserve it.

It's a horrible thought, but I almost wished that I hadn't gotten clean. That I never asked mom to look into anything and that I never heard these words today. The gut-wrenching guilt was almost too much to bear, but I knew that I had to. I have to endure this mental hell because it's what I deserve and worst.

I walked back to her and kissed her forehead. "Don't worry, Mom. It'll all work out, I promise. Just do me this one favor, keep an eye on her. If anything happens, let me know right away. Don't let them hurt her again. Please."

"Where are you going?"

I wasn't sure about that myself, but I knew I needed to be alone. "I need some time alone to think and to look over this stuff." I held up the papers and printouts in my hand. "Tell Reggie I want to meet him; he's working for me now."

"Sure, fine, but where will you go? You've been gone for months already." She was right. I couldn't just stay in a hotel because I'd already been pushing it being gone this long, and there was no way I could push it much further without being found out. Then the idea came to me. It was the perfect answer.

"I'm heading to the mountains." She would know what that meant. Not many people know about the mountain cabin hidden away in the Rockies. Elena's been there more than once over the years, but I never took anyone else there, and I doubt anyone else knows that it exists.

It was our special place and not something I was willing to share with anyone else, thank heaven because it looked like I was going to need the solitude to think over everything I'd just learned. It's been years since I've been there, and the last time was with her. That means the memories are going to kill my ass.

"I don't have to tell you that it might be better if you didn't tell anyone about this or about where I've gone." Finally, I walked out the door with a new purpose. I held back the anger and the tears as I slammed the door to the rental car before gunning it to the airport.

I refused to look at the evidence until hours later, when I was back in the States. I picked up some essentials, not risking calling the groundskeeper to find out if the place was stocked because I didn't want anyone to know I was there. I didn't want anyone around to see my rage. Plus, I needed the solitude and time to plan.