My blood instantly crystallized into ice.
Mark. Her husband of four agonizingly long years. The man possessing the impeccably polished smile, the thirty-thousand-dollar wristwatch, the aggressively firm handshake, and the smooth, authoritative baritone that commanded immediate trust in executive boardrooms. I had despised him from the moment he stepped into our lives, yet I had never possessed a shred of tangible proof. Emily had always served as his impenetrable shield, armed with an endless arsenal of rehearsed excuses: He’s under immense pressure at the firm. We simply had too much wine. It was a massive misunderstanding. I tripped over the rug, Sarah, I’m so incredibly clumsy. Tonight, the ammunition had finally run dry. There were no explanations left to hide behind.
“He told me I embarrassed him,” she whimpered, the words bleeding through her fingers. “At the charity dinner. In front of his prospective clients.”
I leaned back, my hands gripping the underside of the wooden chair with such feral intensity my knuckles ached.
“Has he done this before, Emily?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, and nodded once.
The kitchen plunged into an absolute, suffocating silence, punctuated only by the low, mechanical drone of my aging refrigerator. I stared across the table at my identical twin—the woman who had mirrored my own face since the moment of our birth—and something fundamentally shifted deep within my chest. A cold, surgical, and extraordinarily dangerous architecture settled into place.
I stood up, the chair scraping loudly against the linoleum. “Come upstairs. You need to sleep.”
She didn’t argue. She just let me lead her into the dark, entirely unaware of the catastrophic gears turning in my mind.
Chapter 2: The Borrowed Skin
