My Fiancée Married My Sister

Chapter 17

I woke before my alarm, which never happened. Not in the old apartment, where the radiator banged like it was angry at the building, and definitely not in the last six months of my life, where sleep had been something I fought for and mostly lost. Here, in Noah Sinclair’s guest wing, the silence woke me instead. Total and padded, like the world outside had been switched off.

For a second I forgot where I was. Then the ceiling came into focus, too high, too white, and it all came back. The penthouse. The arrangement. The six months.

I lay there a while, staring up, running my thumb along the edge of the sheet. Crisp. Expensive. Nothing like Diana’s mismatched flannel set that I’d been borrowing since the day I showed up on her doorstep with one suitcase and a face I couldn’t hold together.

I missed that flannel set more than I wanted to admit.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand, next to the little photo of Diana and me from design school. I almost didn’t look. Then I saw the name.

Mom.

My stomach dropped the way it always did now, fast and cold, like missing a step in the dark. I let it ring twice more before I picked it up, and even then I didn’t say hello.

“Jasmine.” My mother’s voice had that particular brightness she used when she wanted something and didn’t want to admit it. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I’ve been busy,” I said those three words and didn’t offer more.

“Busy?” She said and paused, and I could picture her exactly, standing in the kitchen with the phone pressed too hard to her ear, the way she did when she was choosing her next sentence carefully. “Ava said you moved out of Diana’s. Somewhere nicer, from what I hear.”

So that was it. Word traveled fast, even when I hadn’t told anyone but Diana. I closed my eyes. “Is that why you’re calling? To ask about where I live now?”

“I’m calling because you’re my daughter.” Her voice caught, just slightly, and an old habit made something in my chest twist toward her before I could stop it. “Whatever happened between you and Ryan, whatever happened with your sister… You don’t just disappear from this family, Jasmine.”

I sat up. The sheets pooled around my waist, and outside the window, the city was already moving, small, gray, and far away. “I didn’t disappear. I left. There’s a difference.”

“You’re being dramatic.” There it was. The old script. The one I’d heard my whole life, every time I took up too much space, felt too much, wanted too much. “Nobody made you leave the wedding planning. Nobody made you leave this family.”

“Ava was in his bed three days before the wedding.” My voice came out steadier than I expected. Flat. Almost bored, if boredom could sit on top of something that still burned. “And when I told you, you asked me not to make a scene. So no. Nobody made me leave. You just made it very clear I wasn’t going to be missed.”

Then she went silent. The kind that used to make me apologize just to fill it. I didn’t fill it this time.

“She’s your sister,” my mother finally said, like that settled anything.

“And I was your daughter first.” I hadn’t meant to say it. It came out anyway, quiet and old and true, and for once I didn’t take it back.

My mother exhaled, sharp, the sound of someone recalibrating. “Fine. Be like this. But Ava’s asking about you. She wants to talk. She says you won’t answer her calls.”

Of course she did. Ava always wanted to talk right up until the moment she had to actually say something true. “I have nothing to say to her.”

“You’ll have to eventually. She’s your sister, and she’s…” My mother stopped herself. Too late.

Something cold slid down my spine. “She’s what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Mom.” My grip tightened on the phone. “She’s what?”

“It’s not my place.” A rustle, like she was moving to another room, lowering her voice out of habit even though there was no one there to hear but me. “Just… talk to your sister, Jasmine. Before it’s too late to fix things.”

She hung up before I could ask again, and I sat there in Noah Sinclair’s guest bed with the phone still warm against my ear, that half-finished sentence hanging in the room like smoke that wouldn’t clear.

She’s your sister, and she’s…

I didn’t like where my mind went next. I didn’t like it at all.

A knock at the door pulled me out of it. Three short raps, businesslike. “Jasmine.” Noah’s voice, muffled through the wood. “Breakfast in twenty. Then I’ll show you the building.”

“Give me a minute.” My own voice sounded strange to me, thin around the edges.

I got up and moved through the motions— shower, clothes, the low hum of getting a body ready when the mind hadn’t caught up yet. In the mirror, I looked mostly like myself. Same warm brown skin, same eyes that gave away too much no matter how hard I tried to school them. But there was something new sitting behind them now. A question I hadn’t asked yet, because I was afraid of the answer.

By the time I reached the main living area, Noah was already at the table, two plates set, coffee steaming beside a folded newspaper he wasn’t reading. He looked up when I came in, and whatever he saw on my face made him go still.

“You look like someone said something to ruin your morning.”

“My mother called.” I sat, wrapped both hands around the coffee cup more for something to hold onto than the warmth. “Ava wants to talk to me.”

“And you don’t want to talk to her.”

“No.” I stared into the cup. “But my mother said something. Started to, and then stopped herself. Something about Ava. She’s your sister, and she’s… and then nothing. Like she caught herself before she said too much.”

Noah set his own cup down slowly, and something shifted in his expression, a flicker so brief I almost missed it. Careful and measured like a man deciding how much weight a sentence could hold before he let it go.

“Noah.” I watched him now the way I used to watch fabric under bad lighting, looking for the flaw I already suspected was there. “What do you know?”

He didn’t answer right away. That silence again, the one that told me more than words could have. Finally, he reached into his jacket and set his phone on the table between us, screen up, already open to something.

“I was going to wait until after breakfast.” His voice had gone very quiet, very controlled, the way it did when he was bracing for a reaction. “But you should probably see this now.”

I looked down at the screen, and the coffee cup slipped an inch in my hand before I caught it.

It was a photograph. Ava, unmistakably Ava, standing outside a building I recognized instantly because I’d walked past it a hundred times chasing fabric swatches and client meetings. Lancaster Corp. Except she wasn’t just standing outside it.

She was walking in like she belonged there. Like she owned the place.

And beneath the photo, a headline that made the room tilt slightly around me.

“Read the caption,” Noah said, and for the first time since I’d met him, I heard something that almost sounded like worry underneath the calm.