spouses.”

Nikki found her voice.

“You’re being inappropriate.”

That almost made me laugh.

“Inappropriate?” I asked.

“That’s an interesting word choice from you.”

People nearby began to notice the tension.

Damen shifted closer, lowering his voice.

“Do not start a scene.”

Jackson stepped in then, calm as ever.

“Maybe she wouldn’t need a scene if you hadn’t spent a month writing one.”

Damen went rigid.

Before he could answer, the woman with the microphone called his name from the stage.

“Damen! You and Nikki are up first.

Come tell us how you two met.”

A ripple of applause moved through the room.

This was the moment they had rehearsed.

They climbed the short steps together.

Nikki smoothed her dress.

Damen took the microphone with a confident smile that only looked natural from a distance.

He began telling my story.

He described the party.

The window.

The joke.

The feeling of seeing “her” across the room.

A few people laughed warmly.

Someone said, “That’s a great story.”

Then Jackson raised his hand like he was in a classroom.

“Funny,” he said.

“Because that’s not Nikki’s story.

That’s Carissa’s.”

Silence.

The kind that does not fall.

The kind that drops.

Damen forced a laugh.

“Jack, not now.”

But Jackson was already walking toward the front with me beside him.

He turned to the room.

“You all think Nikki is Damen’s wife because he never corrected you years ago.

That’s bad enough.

What’s worse is that he brought his actual wife’s sister here to keep the lie going.”

Gasps spread like sparks.

Nikki grabbed for the microphone.

“That’s not what this is.”

I looked directly at her.

“Then explain why you were practicing my proposal story in my living room yesterday.”

Damen barked my name, sharp and furious.

I ignored him.

“Or explain why he had his hand on your face like he’d done it a hundred times.”

The room had changed by then.

You could feel it.

Curiosity turning into disgust.

Old classmates studying Damen not as the polished success he wanted to be, but as a man caught performing someone else’s life.

He tried the usual move first.

“You’re overreacting.

You’ve always been jealous—”

“No,” I said clearly into the mic Jackson had taken from the stand and handed to me.

“I was generous.

There’s a difference.”

Then I did the thing I had debated all day.

I told the truth without theatrics.

I told them I was his wife.

I told them Nikki was my younger sister.

I told them I had been helping support her financially.

I told them Damen asked my permission after he had already secured hers.

And then, because I had reached the point where embarrassment belonged to the guilty, not the betrayed, I told them I believed the affair had started long before the reunion.

Nikki burst into tears on cue.

It would have worked, too, if Jackson had not quietly said, “Tell them whose earrings you’re wearing.”

All eyes went to the pearls.

“My grandmother’s,” I said.

“Mine, technically.

She never gave them back.”

It sounds small, but sometimes one undeniable detail cracks open a whole lie.

Because suddenly Nikki no longer looked like a graceful wife defending her relationship.

She looked like what she was: a woman dressed in pieces of another woman’s