Then he delivered the line that changed something permanent in me.

“Nikki already said yes.”

He had asked her before asking me.

My younger sister, who I had been supporting for two years because she was always one crisis away from disaster, had agreed to replace me in my own marriage for a public event and had not warned me.

I heard my own voice ask, “You asked her first?”

“Logistics,” he said with a shrug.

“She thinks it sounds fun.”

Fun.

That night I did not sleep.

I lay on my side and listened to Damen breathe beside me, one arm flung over the mattress like he had no fear in the world.

I stared at the ceiling and walked backward through every recent month.

The sudden closeness between him and Nikki.

Her dramatic requests for money that always seemed to surge when he was between jobs.

Their private jokes.

The way my mother always said I was lucky Damen tolerated my hours, as if my career were some feminine defect I needed forgiven.

By morning, I had a headache and a decision.

I would not explode.

I would watch.

The next day I came home early.

I had not told him I was leaving the office ahead of schedule.

The house was quiet except for voices in the living room.

When I stepped inside, I found my husband and my sister on the sofa with glasses of wine, rehearsing.

“Hey,” I said.

“I figured I could help.

Give feedback.”

Neither of them looked embarrassed.

That was what chilled me most.

They were not surprised to be caught because they did not see themselves as guilty.

They saw themselves as clever.

“When they ask how we met,” Damen was saying, “I’ll tell them I saw you across the room at a friend’s birthday party and knew I had to talk to you.”

I went cold all over.

That was not a convenient fake story.

It was the true story of how he had met me.

I remembered the window behind him at that party.

The joke he made about the bad playlist.

The way we talked until the host started stacking cups in the kitchen.

I remembered thinking he was so attentive, so hungry to know me, so different from other men who only listened until their turn to speak.

“That’s our story,” I said.

Damen glanced up.

“Exactly.

I know it by heart.”

I looked at Nikki.

She was curled into the corner of my sofa like she belonged there, one leg tucked under her, one hand wrapped around a wineglass I had bought on clearance during our first year of marriage.

“You’re okay with this?” I asked.

She examined her nails.

“Carissa, it’s not that deep.

You don’t own a story.”

Then they moved on to the proposal.

My proposal.

The rooftop restaurant.

The champagne.

The night wind tangling my hair.

The speech he gave about choosing me every day for the rest of his life.

He recited it like dialogue.

Nikki smiled and repeated back the details, practicing where to laugh and where to look touched.

I corrected one detail almost without thinking, and Damen mocked my voice in front of her.

She laughed.

Something in me hardened.

I went upstairs because my hands were shaking.