His Second Woman

Chapter 4

Kaylen

The first person Kaylen saw was Clara.

Standing at the bedroom door.

Smiling.

Not crying. Not screaming.

Smiling.

Kaylen shot upright, the sheet clutched to her chest, every drop of warmth from the night before draining out of her at once. Beside her, Xavier stirred, blinking against the sunlight, then went rigid the instant he saw who stood in the doorway.

"Clara," Kaylen's voice cracked on the single syllable.

Clara didn't move from the threshold. She wore yesterday's dress still, wrinkled faintly at the hem, as though she'd walked the city all night the same as Kaylen had. Her hair was perfectly in place and her eyes were dry.

"I'm sorry." Kaylen scrambled for the words, for anything at all. "Clara, I didn't mean this. I never wanted to hurt you, I swear, I can explain–"

"You don't have to explain." Clara's voice was soft. Gentle, even. She stepped into the room, and Kaylen flinched back against the headboard out of old habit, the way a hand flinches from a stove it's been burned on before. But Clara only reached for the curtain, making it open wider, letting more light spill across the floor.

"I already understand."

Xavier sat up fully now, jaw tight. "Clara, this isn't Kaylen's fault. It's mine. I should have–"

"Xavier." Clara turned to him, and something almost tender crossed her face. "You don't owe me an explanation either." She exhaled, a small, rueful sound. "I think, somewhere, I always knew."

The room went quiet. Kaylen searched her sister's face for the crack, the tremor, the thing that should have been there and wasn't. She found nothing. She could only see serenity and that same unbothered warmth Clara had always worn like a second skin at every family dinner and moment Kaylen had needed someone to be angry on her behalf.

"I didn't mean to walk in," Clara added, glancing once at the tangled sheets before politely looking away. "I shouldn't have seen this."

Kaylen's throat tightened around something that felt dangerously close to relief. Maybe she really is this kind. Maybe I've misjudged her all these years. The thought arrived uninvited and clung there, soft and seductive, exactly the way it was meant to.

Clara reached up and, without any visible effort, unclasped the engagement ring from her finger. The diamond caught the morning light, throwing a small bright shape across the ceiling. She crossed the room and took Xavier's hand, turning it palm-up, and placed the ring gently in the center of it, closing his fingers around it herself.

"You deserve someone you truly love," she said.

Xavier stared at his closed fist, then at her, stunned into silence.

Clara smiled once more, soft, unhurried, final and walked out of the room without another word.

Kaylen found her in the hallway a few minutes later, barefoot again, a robe thrown hastily over her shoulders, chasing after the one person she owed an apology too large for words.

"Clara, wait–"

Clara turned at the elevator, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Kaylen searched for something, anything and everything she could twist to undo the last twelve hours.

"I never wanted this," Kaylen said, tears rising again, hot and humiliating. "You have to believe me. I tried to stay away from him, I tried for three years, I didn't know it was him until–"

"Kaylen." Clara stepped forward and pulled her into an embrace before she could finish. It was warm, familiar, almost, in a way their childhood had never quite managed to be. Kaylen stood stiff for a moment, then melted into it, sobbing quietly against her sister's shoulder.

"Take care of him," Clara whispered against her ear.

Kaylen cried harder, guilt closed over her like water over a stone, dragging her under. She believed, in that moment, standing in the hallway with Clara's arms around her, that everything might still be forgiven. That perhaps the two of them could survive this, sisters after all, scarred but intact.

Clara held her a moment longer than necessary. Then she stepped back, smoothed Kaylen's hair once with a gentle hand, and pressed the elevator button without the other. The doors closed between them.

Clara's smile held until the metal sealed shut then it vanished.

Inside her own apartment across the city, Clara locked the bedroom door behind her and crossed to the desk in the corner, sitting with the same unhurried grace she'd carried through Xavier's hallway. She opened her laptop, typed a password. The building's security portal loaded, camera feed after camera feed populating the screen, lobby, elevator, parking garage, every hallway in Xavier's building going back weeks.

She began deleting files, methodically, one after another, footage disappearing into nothing, an entire month of recorded silence erased in minutes.

Except one.

She paused over it, letting it play once, in full, the timestamp glowing in the corner, half past midnight, the hallway camera catching Kaylen's unmistakable figure stepping through Xavier's door, soaked and unsteady, disappearing inside.

Clara watched it twice more then she downloaded it.

Her fingers moved over the keyboard, calm, unblinking, drafting a message. She attached the file, selected a contact from the list, a name she hadn't spoken to aloud in three years, not since the day everything had been arranged so carefully in her favor.

Recipient: Caroline

Message: It's time.

She hit send and closed the laptop, sitting in the sudden quiet of her apartment, hands folded in her lap, expression as untroubled as it had been in Xavier's bedroom that morning.

Her phone buzzed against the desk almost immediately.

She turned it over.

Caroline: Bring her home.

Clara looked at the message for a long moment. Then, slowly, the smile came back, the same one she'd worn walking out of Xavier's apartment, the same one that had fooled Kaylen into believing she'd been forgiven.

She had not been forgiven.

She had only been given time to feel safe before the ground disappeared beneath her.