I FOUND MY SISTER WITH MY HUSBAND

Chapter Four: The Truth She Told

I was still upstairs when I heard the knock.

It was loud, the kind of knock that meant someone had been standing outside for a while, working up the courage to use it.

I heard my mother's footsteps cross the living room. I heard the door open.

Then I heard the slap.

It was sharp enough that I flinched even though I wasn't the one who felt it. I got up from the bed and walked to the top of the stairs, staying just out of sight.

"Mom, you slapped me?" Sophia's voice was shaking.

"Yes," my mother said. "I would slap you over and over again for sleeping with your sister's husband. I did not raise you to do something like this."

I looked down through the railing. Sophia was standing in the doorway with her hand pressed to her cheek. Damian stood beside her, and their fingers were laced together.

Seeing that made my stomach turn.

"Your sister was doing you a favor," my mother went on. "She brought you into her home. She let you eat at her table and sleep under her roof. And all you could do with that kindness was take her husband from her."

Sophia's face changed. The shock from the slap turned into something harder.

"Mom, you're standing here supporting that b***h," she said. "The barren woman. She is not my sister."

"Sophia—"

"I came here to beg," Sophia said, cutting her off. "But let me tell you the truth instead, since you want to stand there and judge me. Amelia is bad luck. She aborted different pregnancies when she was younger. That's why she can't carry a child now. I had to save Damian from becoming a man with no children of his own."

My hand gripped the railing.

None of that was true. There had been no abortions. There had been years of doctors, tests, and disappointment that Sophia had sat through with me at every single appointment, holding my hand and telling me it would happen when it was meant to happen.

She had lied to my face for two years about Damian.

Now she was lying about this too, and she was doing it in front of my mother.

"That's enough," Damian said. He put his hand on his mother-in-law's arm. "Please, don't hit her again. Just let us go."

My mother pulled her arm back.

"Get out of my house," she said. "Both of you."

Sophia tightened her hand around Damian's.

"We're leaving," she said. "We only came because I wanted to explain myself to you, but I can see there's no point."

She turned around, still holding his hand, and walked back down the steps toward the car.

Damian looked up once, toward the top of the stairs. I don't know if he saw me standing there or not. He didn't say anything. He just turned and followed Sophia out.

My mother closed the door and stood there for a moment with her hand still on the handle.

Then she broke down.

I came down the stairs as fast as I could. She was standing in the middle of the living room, both hands over her face, her shoulders shaking.

"Mom."

She looked up at me. Her eyes were red, and her hand was still marked from where it had struck Sophia's face.

"I heard everything," I said.

"None of that is true, Amelia," she said. "None of it. I know my daughter. I know what you went through trying to have a child. She stood right there and lied to my face."

"I know."

"I don't understand how she could say something like that. About her own sister."

I sat her down on the couch and held her hand the way she had held mine the night I showed up at her door.

"She's not trying to convince you anymore, Mom," I said quietly. "She already has what she came for. She was trying to make herself feel less guilty about taking it."

My mother shook her head slowly, still trying to make sense of what she had just heard.

"She held your hand at your wedding," she whispered.

"I know."

Neither of us said anything else for a long time. We just sat there together, in a house that had just watched two people walk away from it holding hands, one of them carrying a lie about me that I would now have to live with too.