Playing Mr. Playboy

Chapter 2: Someone Else's Sister

Elena's POV

Priya let herself in the next afternoon, exactly the way she always did — no knock, no warning, just the click of a key in the lock and the door swinging open like the apartment belonged to her as much as it belonged to me.

"Auntie Priya!" Sophie went tearing across the living room and latched onto her legs.

"There's my favorite person in the whole world," Priya said, scooping her up with the ease of someone who'd been doing it since Sophie was born. Then, over the top of Sophie's head, to me: "Danny told me you found out about the tattoo."

She set Sophie down and yanked the collar of her blouse aside to show me a small, tasteful outline of a swallow inked just below her collarbone. "See? Not exactly scandalous. Mom would still have an actual stroke, though, if she knew."

I laughed, and it was a real laugh, because — okay, fine. It was exactly the kind of secret Priya would keep from their mother. Exactly the kind of thing Daniel would help her hide, the way he'd been helping her hide things since he was seventeen and she was twelve and their father died and he became the only adult in her life who actually showed up.

"You could've just told her yourself," I said, still smiling despite the small, tight coil that had been sitting in my chest since that half-second flicker on Daniel's face two nights ago.

"And ruin the surprise of her disowning me at Christmas dinner?" Priya flopped onto the couch like she'd been doing it her whole life — which, in a way, she had — kicked off her heels, and reached for the remote without asking. "Ooh, is there wine open? Danny said I could crash here tonight, that okay?"

"Of course," I said, because it was always okay. It had been okay for eleven years — Priya's key, Priya's standing invitation, the credit card Daniel kept quietly funded for her since business school, the way she called this apartment home more naturally, some days, than her own place three neighborhoods over.

I went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of wine, and when I came back she'd already changed the channel and put her feet up on the coffee table, scrolling through her phone with the particular unbothered comfort of a woman who had never once in her life questioned whether she was welcome somewhere.

"How was Vegas, by the way?" I asked, handing her the glass. "Danny said he saw you there last week."

Her thumb paused over her phone for exactly a beat too long. "Vegas?"

"For the conference. He mentioned running into you."

"Oh—" She laughed, a little too brightly. "Right, yeah. Small world, huh? I was there for a friend's bachelorette."

I hadn't actually asked Daniel any such thing. I'd made it up on the spot, just to watch her face. And her face had done something — not much, just a flicker of hesitation before the recovery — that I recognized now, because I'd seen it on her brother's face two nights ago too.

I told myself it was nothing. Priya had always been a little scattered, a little quick to cover for things that didn't need covering — forgotten appointments, white lies to their mother, small vanities she didn't want anyone examining too closely. It didn't mean anything.

It probably didn't mean anything.

★★★

We stayed up late, the three of us — Daniel came home around nine, tie loosened, exhausted from a day of meetings, and dropped onto the couch between his sister and me like he'd collapsed there a thousand times before, which he had.

Priya curled her legs up under her, resting her head on his shoulder for a moment the way she'd done since she was a teenager grieving her father, and he let her, absent, automatic, the way you let a habit happen without noticing it anymore.

I watched them from the armchair, a glass of wine warming in my hand, and something in me — something I couldn't name yet — sat up and paid attention.

It wasn't that there was anything wrong with a brother and sister being close. Daniel had raised her, in every way that mattered, after their father died and their mother folded in on herself with grief. Of course they were close. Of course she leaned on him.

But I found myself cataloguing things I'd never once thought to catalogue before. The key. The credit card. The fact that she'd shown up at our door, at our lease-signing, at the hospital the night Sophie was born, before Daniel's own mother had even known Elena was in labor. The fact that she called this apartment "home." The fact that she never — not once in eleven years — knocked.

Is this normal? I thought, watching her tuck her feet under Daniel's thigh, watching him absently pat her ankle without even looking away from the television. Is this what a normal sibling relationship looks like, or have I just never had anything to compare it to?

I didn't have an answer. I finished my wine and told myself, the way I'd been telling myself all week, that I was imagining things — that suspicion, once you let it in the door, has a way of turning every ordinary thing strange.

Priya fell asleep on the couch sometime around midnight, the television still murmuring low. Daniel carried a blanket out and draped it over her without being asked, the same automatic tenderness he'd shown her a hundred times before, in front of me, without either of us ever once questioning it.

I stood in the hallway a moment too long before bed, watching my husband's sister sprawled comfortably across furniture that wasn't hers, in a home she moved through like she'd never really left it.

Eleven years, and I had never once asked myself whether that was strange.

I was asking now.

I turned off the last lamp and went to bed, and lay awake beside my husband long after his breathing had evened into sleep, running through every small, ordinary detail of his sister's life in our lives, looking for the seam. I didn't find it. Not yet.

But for the first time, I understood that I was looking for one at all.