Reborn To Steal Her Billionaire Husband

Her hands were on my back before I even heard her move. One second I was standing at the edge, looking out at the valley below, the wind pulling at my hair, thinking how strange it was that Reva had invited me here. She never invited me anywhere. Not since we were children, and even then it had always felt like a leftover kindness, something she handed out when she had nothing better to do. I had told myself not to read too much into it. A picnic. Just two sisters on a Tuesday afternoon with a blanket spread out and a basket between us and a view that made everything feel smaller than it was. I had let myself be happy about it. That was my mistake. Her hands hit my back hard and flat and certain. I reached for something that was not there and then there was nothing beneath my feet and then there was nothing at all. * * * White. Complete and total white, the way a room looks when you walk in from bright sun and your eyes refuse to adjust. Except it stayed. It just held and held and held. Then sound. My own voice. A gasp torn from somewhere deep, the sound a body makes when it fights its way back to itself against everything telling it not to. I sat up so fast the room tilted. Yellow curtains with a small tear at the bottom left corner that my mother had been meaning to fix for three years. The crack in the ceiling above my bed looked like a river if you stared at it long enough. The smell of coffee and my mother's perfume drifts from somewhere downstairs. My bedroom. My childhood bedroom. The one I had slept in every night for twenty-three years before I left it for the last time. I pressed both hands flat against the mattress and breathed. The fabric under my palms was real. The morning light through the curtains was real. My heart slamming against my ribs was very, very real. I was alive. More than alive. I was back. I got up slowly and crossed to the mirror on the back of my door and stood in front of it and looked at myself for a long moment. Twenty-three years old. Same face, same eyes, same small mole beneath my left ear. Same girl who had spent her whole life being the second answer to every question in this house. I was supposed to be dead at the bottom of a cliff. Instead, I was standing in my bedroom on the morning of the choosing day with every memory I had ever made sitting fully intact behind my eyes. Including the last one. Including Reva's hands. I pressed two fingers to my sternum and felt my heartbeat and thought about everything I knew. I knew what happened when Reva chose first. I had lived it. A full year watching the man she picked treat her like furniture he had grown tired of. While the man she passed over for me turned out to be something I had never once been prepared for. Gentle. Present. The first person in my adult life who looked at me and found something worth staying for. I knew Reva had watched all of it from a distance and let the jealousy eat her alive until it became something far worse than jealousy. I knew how it ended. So I was not going to let Reva choose first. I pulled on a dress and fixed my hair and stood at my bedroom door for ten full seconds. Everything downstairs would look the same as it always had. My mother was at the stove, sharp-eyed and certain about which daughter she preferred. My father is behind his newspaper, content to let her run everything. And Reva, dressed and polished and already at the table like a woman who had the whole day mapped out. What had changed was me. I opened the door and walked down. * * * The kitchen smelled like coffee and toast and the quiet of a morning that had no idea how much it was about to matter. My mother stood at the stove with her back to the room. My father sat behind his newspaper. And Reva was at the table in pale blue, her hair pinned perfectly, both hands wrapped around her mug. She looked up when I came in. She smiled. It was a perfect smile. Warm and easy, the one she had been practicing since we were old enough to understand that presentation was its own currency. I had spent years studying that smile and believing it. Years of wanting it aimed at me, wanting to be the sister she chose to be warm toward. I smiled back, pulled out the chair across from her, and sat down. "Morning," she said. "Morning." My mother set a coffee cup in front of me without looking at me, which was normal. She set one in front of Reva with a small pat on her shoulder, which was also normal. I wrapped my fingers around the mug and watched the steam rise and kept my breathing even. Today the two families would meet. The men would be presented. The daughters would indicate their preference and the parents would finalize what had already been agreed in private. That was how it worked in our world. Clean and arranged and dressed up as a choice. In my past life, I had sat at this very table and watched Reva move first, as she always did, and I had taken what was left. That was normal too. That was the whole story of my life sitting in four words. Not today. I looked across at my sister and found her watching me, that smile still perfectly in place. Everything about her was composed. Nothing out of order. Except her hand. Her right hand was tight around the mug. Tight enough that the skin across her knuckles had gone pale, and she either hadn't noticed or couldn't stop it, and either way it told me something she would never have said out loud. She remembered. I looked at her hand and then back at her face and we sat there across a breakfast table with the truth of what she had done sitting between us like a third person, and she held my gaze and did not look away, and neither did I. Then she lifted the mug to her lips and the moment sealed itself shut. "Big day," she said lightly. "Yes," I said. I turned to the window and watched the garden and drank my coffee and thought about what I was going to do, and how I was going to do it, and how it would feel to finally, in this life, choose first.