---- Chapter 14 "No! Please, Caleb, no!" Hailie's screams were shrill, desperate. My parents, who had followed them to the villa, stood in the doorway of the basement, their faces ashen. "Caleb, son, stop this," my father pleaded, his voice weak. "This... this is wrong." Caleb just laughed, a harsh, broken sound. "Wrong? You want to talk about wrong? You let her die! You stood by and watched while this... this thing," he gestured at Hailie, "stole her life!" He turned his burning gaze on Hailie. "Tell them," he commanded. "Tell them everything you did." Faced with the terrifying heat of the sauna and the cold fury in Caleb's eyes, Hailie broke. The confession came tumbling out, a torrent of ugly truths. She admitted to orchestrating the "threats," to faking the car crash, to pushing Ericka at the cemetery, to setting the fire, to framing her for the fall from the hospital window. She admitted everything, her words punctuated by hysterical sobs. My parents listened, their faces crumbling. The full weight of ---- their complicity, their willful blindness, crashed down upon them. "|... | did it because | loved you all so much," Hailie cried, a last, desperate attempt at manipulation. "I just wanted to be part of the family!" "You are not family," Beverley whispered, her voice trembling with a mixture of grief and rage. "You are a monster. You killed my baby." Hailie turned her pleading eyes to Caleb. "Caleb, you loved me once! | know you did! You can't do this to me!" "I never loved you," Caleb said, his voice dead. "| loved an idea. A replacement. A lie. And because of that lie, the only person | ever truly loved is dead." His words were a final, devastating blow. The fight went out of Hailie. She slumped in her chair, a broken doll. But then, a flicker of her old defiance returned. A twisted, mocking smile touched her lips. "Fine," she spat, her voice dripping with venom. "You're all so high and mighty now. But you're just as much to blameas | am." She looked at my parents. "You were so desperate to replace her you didn't even bother to check my story." She looked at Fitzgerald. "You were so eaten up with guilt and a twisted sense of duty that you tortured your own sister." ---- Then, her eyes landed on Caleb. "And you... you were the worst of all. You held all the power, and you used it to break her. | may have lit the match, but you all poured the gasoline. You're all murderers." Her words hit their mark. They were the undeniable truth. Caleb's face contorted. He grabbed her hair, dragging her from the chair. "Shut up!" He threw her into the darkness of a storage closet and slammed the door, her mocking laughter echoing behind it. The basement fell silent. The weight of Hailie's words settled on them, a suffocating shroud of guilt. My mother fainted. My father, looking like a man who had aged twenty years in twenty minutes, could only stare into the abyss of his own failure. The house of cards they had built had finally, irrevocably, collapsed.