I Married My Sister's Killer

The dress still smells like her. That's the detail no one warns you about when you put on a dead woman's wedding gown. Not the weight of the silk, not the way the boning digs into ribs that are narrower than the ones it was tailored for. It's the smell — her perfume ghosted into the fibers, something like white tea and burnt sugar, and every time I breathe in I am breathing in my sister. "Turn," says the seamstress, a woman named Odette who has pins in her mouth and has not once looked me in the eye. I don't think she's been told. I don't think anyone downstairs has been told anything except that Iris Calloway is marrying Damian Voss on Saturday, and that the family wants the fitting done quietly, without press. I turn. In the mirror, I do not look like myself. That's the point. Same dark hair, same height, same face that made strangers do a double-take our entire childhood — are you two twins, or is one of you the evil one — but I've spent four days relearning how Iris held her chin, how she let her eyes go flat and pleasant in rooms full of men like the one I'm about to marry. It is the hardest performance of my life, and I have exactly one week to keep giving it. Six days ago, a detective told me my sister died of a fentanyl overdose in a hotel bathroom, in a city she had no reason to be in, three days before her wedding. Six days ago, I signed a form saying I'd claimed her body. Six days ago, my father sat across from me at his kitchen table, dry-eyed, and asked me to do something I am still not sure I've forgiven myself for agreeing to. Marry him anyway. Those were his words. Not find out what happened to your sister. Not avenge her. His first instinct, with Iris three days in the ground, was to protect a deal. And when I told him I'd rather die than let that man anywhere near me, he said the thing that changed my mind: "Then find out if he's the reason she's already dead." So here I am. Twenty-six years old, wearing my dead sister's dress, about to marry a stranger under a name that isn't mine, because I would rather walk into the fire than spend the rest of my life wondering if I let her killer get away with it. *** Damian Voss is not what I expected. I built him in my head for six days — cold, calculating, a man who marries for merger contracts and doesn't notice when his bride is a different woman entirely. I expected someone I could hate on sight. It would have made this so much easier. Instead, when I walk into the private dining room at the top of the Voss building — glass on three sides, the city spread out beneath us like something you could reach down and rearrange — he's already standing, and he doesn't smile the way men in his position are supposed to smile at the women they're about to acquire. He looks at me. Really looks, the way no one has looked at me in years, because for twenty-six years I have been the sister people looked past to find Iris. "You cut your hair," he says. My stomach drops through the floor. Iris never cut her hair. Not once, not ever — it was down to her waist in every photo I have of her since we were fourteen. Mine has been chin-length since I was twenty-two, because I got tired of being mistaken for her at family events, because some part of me has always wanted a way to be found different, to be found at all. I recovered too slowly. I know it the second his eyes flicker — not confusion. Something closer to interest. "I wanted something new," I say, and my voice doesn't shake, which feels like its own small miracle. "Before the wedding." "Mm." He crosses the room slowly, hands in his pockets, unhurried in a way that makes my pulse louder in my own ears. Up close he's younger than the photos suggested, and there's a stillness to him that isn't calm so much as contained — like a held breath. "New hair. New laugh, too, I noticed, at the engagement dinner in March. You used to laugh with your whole chest. Now it's just —" he tilts his head, studying me the way you'd study a forgery you already suspect is fake — "quieter." I wasn't at the engagement dinner in March. Iris was. I say nothing, because there is nothing safe to say, and the silence stretches long enough that I can hear my own heartbeat over the hum of the building sixty floors above the street. Then Damian Voss does something I don't expect. He smiles — small, private, like he's just decided something and isn't ready to tell me what — and picks up the two glasses of champagne waiting on the table between us. He hands me one. "Grief changes people," he says, and there's a weight underneath the words, a second meaning I can't yet read. "I imagine it changed you a great deal, these last few weeks." It isn't a question. It's a door, held open, and I understand with a cold drop in my chest that he is giving me a way to explain the differences he's already cataloged — the hair, the laugh, whatever else I haven't managed to fake correctly — without either of us having to say out loud what we both, somehow, already know. He doesn't think I'm Iris. And he isn't going to say so. Not yet. "Yes," I say carefully, lifting the glass, watching him over the rim of it the way I imagine my sister would have — assured, untouchable, a woman who has never once had to lie for her life. "Grief changes everything." "To new beginnings, then." His eyes hold mine, and there's something in them I don't have a name for — not quite a threat, not quite an invitation. Something patient. Something that has already decided to wait me out. "Wife." The word lands like a hand closing around my wrist. I lift my glass and drink, and somewhere underneath the fear, something else stirs too — something I refuse to look at directly, the way you don't look directly at the sun. Because the man across from me either killed my sister, or knows who did. And I have never in my life wanted to survive a room this badly.