Halfway up, I heard Nikki laugh again, but this time it sounded different.

Softer.

Private.

I looked through the railing.

Damen was standing close to her now.

Too close.

His hand was on her face, thumb stroking her cheekbone with a tenderness he had not shown me in months.

Nikki leaned into it with the unconscious ease of someone familiar with being touched that way.

They were about to kiss.

When they noticed me, they sprang apart.

“Rehearsal,” Damen said too quickly.

“We have to look like a real couple,” Nikki added.

A real couple.

That phrase followed me all evening.

I blocked our bedroom door that night and asked him directly, “Is there anything going on with you and Nikki?”

An innocent man might have looked shocked.

Hurt.

Confused.

He did none of those things.

He got angry.

He accused me of spying.

He said my job had made me paranoid.

He told me I saw betrayal everywhere because I was incapable of relaxing.

Then, with the cold confidence of someone who had already imagined this scene, he threatened divorce.

It sounded less like an emotional reaction and more like an escape hatch.

That was when I knew.

I left the house and drove straight to Nikki’s apartment.

I had paid her rent more than once.

I had covered her car insurance when she cried about a late fee.

I had sent grocery money on weeks she said things were tight.

That apartment had my fingerprints all over it even if my name was nowhere on the lease.

She opened the door wearing one of my old sweatshirts, the gray one I had been looking for since spring.

“Are you insane?” she hissed.

“It’s late.”

I did not yell.

I asked her one question.

A very specific one about a scar on Damen’s shoulder and where he got it.

Only two kinds of people knew the answer.

Family who had heard the story years ago, or someone who had seen it up close.

Nikki froze.

Her face went blank for less than a second, but it was enough.

Then the tears came.

“Carissa, you’re making this ugly.

You always do this.

He talks to me because you’re never around.”

Never around.

There it was.

The justification people use when they want your labor but resent your attention being elsewhere.

I paid bills.

I held everything together.

I stayed late at work because someone had to.

And somehow my competence had been repackaged as neglect.

I left before I said something irreversible.

In the car, trembling so badly I had to grip the steering wheel with both hands, I finally allowed myself to think the full thought.

They were having an affair.

My husband and my sister.

And somehow, while sleeping in my house and accepting my money, they had managed to convince themselves I was the problem.

I cried for exactly six minutes.

Then I stopped.

Because once grief burned off, what remained was strategy.

Damen was charming in shallow rooms.

Nikki was pretty in the kind of effortless way that drew easy forgiveness.

Together, they would thrive in public if I walked into that reunion as the wronged wife.

They would paint me as bitter, dramatic, unable to let go.

So I needed a move neither of them