Ella

Ella is Cassiopée's stepmother and the principal source of hostility within Ryan's household. The narrative presents her not as a difficult but misunderstood parent, but as a malicious, materially self-interested woman whose conduct isolates Ryan from his children and makes ordinary family contact feel unsafe. Her importance lies in the damage she produces around herself: Cassiopée's anger, Theo's withdrawal, Ryan's passivity, and the decision to leave the household all take shape in opposition to her.

Identity and Household Position

Ella entered the family after Ryan's divorce, when Theo was two years old. Cassiopée and Theo never accepted her, and the text attributes that estrangement partly to Ella's failure to build a healthy relationship with either child. Instead of becoming a stabilizing adult, she is described as unpleasant, malicious, and preoccupied with what she can obtain from the man beside her. Her presence divides the household into hostile camps: Ryan and Ella on one side, and Cassiopée and Theo on the other, with Ryan's emotional dependence on Ella preventing him from recognizing the division clearly.

The narrative gives Ella power less through affection than through influence. She criticizes Cassiopée as though her own judgments were universal truths, behaves as if everything is owed to her, and remains confident that Ryan will not challenge her version of events. Cassiopée sees her as a monster rather than merely an unsympathetic stepmother, while Ryan's inability to perceive what she is doing becomes almost as damaging as Ella's conduct itself. The household therefore turns on a triangular structure: Ella attacks, Cassiopée resists, and Ryan fails to intervene until the conflict has already become destructive.

Conflict with Cassiopée and Theo

Cassiopée's weekend visits to her father's home are marked by tumult rather than rest. She spends much of the time in her room or in the garden with Theo, who prefers her company to remaining in the same room as Ella. His avoidance shows that Ella's influence reaches beyond a single antagonistic relationship; the younger child has learned that distance is safer than confrontation. Ryan notices that his children are estranged from him and feels unhappy about it, but he does not examine the role he plays by continuing to accept Ella's behavior without meaningful resistance.

A seemingly ordinary reunion exposes the pattern. When Cassiopée and Theo greet one another warmly, Ella appears at the door with a closed expression and a sarcastic welcome. The siblings' happiness disappears immediately. Cassiopée answers with an equally hypocritical smile, passes Ella while pushing her shoulder, and goes upstairs, while Theo follows her rather than stay with his stepmother. The exchange is small in physical scale but decisive in emotional terms: Ella's arrival converts familial affection into guarded hostility, and the children's movement away from her makes their rejection visible.

The dispute escalates when Cassiopée announces that she intends to travel to Santa Fe to prepare an academic project. Ella reacts with panic because the city is associated with the years Ryan spent with Cassiopée's mother. Cassiopée recognizes that discomfort and deliberately names the connection, exposing how strongly Ella wishes to control both the household's present and Ryan's memories of his former marriage. Ella orders her not to continue, but Cassiopée challenges the command and accuses Ella of exploiting Ryan while he remains blinded by her words. The argument strips away the household's polite surface: Cassiopée is no longer asking to be heard, but openly contesting Ella's authority.

Violence and the Breakdown of Authority

Ryan's response turns the family conflict into an act of direct violence. Before Cassiopée can say more, he slaps her. Ella briefly widens her eyes and then smiles faintly, a reaction that makes her role in the scene especially disturbing: she does not need to strike Cassiopée herself to benefit from the punishment. Her expression suggests satisfaction at seeing Cassiopée disciplined and at having Ryan act on her side. Ryan immediately regrets the blow when he sees his daughter's tearful eyes, but the regret arrives after the boundary has been crossed.

Cassiopée's reply is cold and final in tone. She tells her father that he has made her task easier, implying that the assault confirms rather than changes her judgment of the household. Ella's authority is therefore paradoxical. She can provoke Ryan into enforcing her position, yet that enforcement destroys his relationship with his daughter and strengthens Cassiopée's resolve to separate herself from the home. The scene converts domestic control into a visible loss: Ryan may retain the house and the marriage, but he loses the trust of the child who had been warning him about Ella.

Narrative Function and Significance

Ella embodies the private form of institutionalized disbelief that the novel also examines elsewhere. In Cassiopée's account of Shelby Anderson Barnum's abuse, a powerful family is able to turn a victim into an accused person; in Ella's household, the mechanism is smaller but recognizable. Ella presents her judgments as truth, Ryan accepts them, and the person who objects is treated as the problem. The resulting structure does not require a public courtroom. It operates through repetition, belittlement, emotional pressure, and the authority of the person who controls the atmosphere of the home.

Her characterization also creates a sharp contrast with the fragile but necessary trust represented by other relationships. Shelby Anderson Barnum's disclosure to Sunmi Eun is met with careful attention, physical reassurance, and an effort to regulate fear, whereas Cassiopée's disclosures and objections at home meet criticism, disbelief, or punishment. Against that contrast, Ella becomes a figure of failed attachment: she does not make herself a secure adult presence for Cassiopée or Theo, and her behavior encourages withdrawal rather than confidence. The children's flight into separate rooms, gardens, or one another's company is the practical result of that failure.

Ella's conflict with Cassiopée remains significant even when she is not physically present. She is tied to the family's refusal to confront its own history, especially Ryan's memories of Cassiopée's mother and the unresolved power of the earlier marriage. By reacting so sharply to Santa Fe, she reveals insecurity about a past she cannot erase. By provoking the slap, she helps convert that insecurity into a permanent fracture. Ella consequently functions less as an isolated villain than as the pressure point through which buried loyalties, parental cowardice, and the children's need for autonomy become impossible to conceal.