Chapter 4

The house had been empty for almost a decade.

I grew up there—before marriage, before Julian, before I became someone I no longer recognized. My parents had moved to a newer development years ago, but they never sold this place.

Too much history, my mother said. I wondered now if that was the real reason, or if she had simply forgotten it existed.

I let myself in with the spare key. Dust layered the furniture. The air was stale, heavy with disuse.

I climbed the narrow stairs to the attic.

The attic was crowded with old boxes, broken lamps, furniture no one wanted. I searched methodically—first the trunks, then the stacked bins, then the loose items scattered near the window.

I found it in a leather suitcase shoved against the far wall where Celeste'd left it the summer she'd flown to Los Angeles.

Inside: journals, photographs, and a small metal box.

I opened the box.

Dozens of Letters, folded neatly, envelopes yellowed with age.

The top one was addressed in a handwriting I knew too well.

*To Julian.*

I pulled out the first sheet.

*Julian, you came to the house again today. You looked at her the way I wish you would look at me. I know I shouldn't feel this way, but I can't stop.*

The next one was dated weeks later.

*I heard you're going to marry her. My sister is so lucky. Do you ever wonder what would have happened if I had met you first?*

My hands began to shake.

I kept digging. The letters went deeper—some from before the wedding, some from after. The handwriting grew more confident, the words less careful.

At the bottom of the box, beneath the letters, I found a photograph.

Celeste and Julian standing side by side under a cherry blossom tree. Her head rested against his shoulder. One hand lay on her stomach—rounded, unmistakable.

I turned the photo over.

On the back, in Celeste's looping script: *"The unloved one is the mistress."*

It was the line of a girl who had spent her entire life knowing, in the deepest and most unforgivable part of herself, that she had not.

She had not won.

She had only stolen.

I stood there in the dim attic, the photograph pressed between my fingers, and felt the floor tilt beneath me.

I read it.

I read it again.

Not a theory anymore. Not a suspicion.

She had been pregnant before I ever was. And eighteen years ago, the same year I gave birth to that child I was told was mine—she had gone abroad.

—but it was not my kid.

My hands started shaking.

*Then where in the entire world was my child?*

I pulled out my phone and messaged the private investigator.

*Check the hospital records for the day my daughter was born. June 21, 3:00 to 5:00 PM. Also check Celeste's overseas records. Anything about a birth.*

I hit send and sat down on a dusty trunk.

The phone in my pocket buzzed.

It wasn't anybody.

Rither not the investigator—a notification from my home security app.

> ***Living Room camera: Motion detected. 9:14 a.m.***

I frowned. Julian had said he would be at the office. The housekeeper had the day off.

I tapped the live feed.

The video loaded slowly, then resolved into color.

......

The live feed loaded in stages, one frozen frame at a time, the way bad news always loaded—buffering, buffering, finally clearing.

Our living room.

Julian sat at one end, his tie loose, his head tipped back against the cushions. He looked exhausted.

Then Celeste walked into the frame.

She wasn't in the cream silk suit she'd worn to my dinner table. She was in a slip of black silk that ended mid-thigh, the straps thin as wire, the kind of thing a woman wore at home for one audience of one.

She sat down beside him, then shifted onto his lap. Her fingers found the top button of his shirt and worked it open.

Julian did not push her away.

His hand slid up her back, into her hair, then down to her waist. He pulled her closer.

She leaned in, her mouth near his ear. I couldn't hear what she said.

But I could see him react.

His breathing changed. His hands tightened.

"Celeste," he said—loud enough for the mic to catch. "Not here."

But he didn't stop her.

She laughed, soft and low, and kept unbuttoning his shirt.

I watched the screen and gripped of my phone with both hands and watched her thread her fingers into his hair the way I had not threaded my fingers into his hair in six years.

"Julian." Her voice came through the speaker, thin and tinny. "When Cal calls me *Auntie*, I—you don't know how much it hurts."

"*Celeste.*" Julian's voice was low.

"He should be calling me *Mom.*"

I watched my husband of eighteen years close his eyes.

The camera kept rolling. The room kept rolling. My husband and my sister did, on the couch I had picked out, what they had apparently been doing somewhere or other for the last nineteen years.

My hands weren't shaking now. They were steady.

I tapped the small red button at the bottom of the screen.

***Recording.***

The phone in my hand vibrated softly to confirm.

I walked to the attic bathroom and leaned over the sink. Nothing came up. Just dry heaves that left my throat burning.

But i still held the phone steady against the sink and let it run.

---

The recording ran for nine minutes and forty-one seconds before I closed the app.

I did not throw up. I had nothing left in my stomach to throw up.

I rinsed my mouth with tap water. I splashed cold water on my face.

Then I walked back into the kitchen, opened my laptop on the breakfast bar, and forwarded the entire nine-minute file to three places.

My attorney.

The private investigator.

Adrian.

I did not write a message to my attorney. The video was the message.

---

I had not slept. The investigator's email came in at 2:47 a.m.

*Found her.*