The Billionaire’s Twin Bride

Chapter 2 — The Costume of a Dead Girl

Calla POV

Cara’s apartment smells like her—some expensive perfume I could never name and fresh dry-cleaning and the faint ghost of the coffee she took black.

We are twin sisters but never so close. I haven’t met her fiancé not even once.

I stand in the doorway at six in the morning with the key still in my hand, and I don’t go in for a full minute. I just breathe through my mouth, like that will help. Like if I don’t fully inhale, the smell of her won’t get all the way in. My fingers curl tighter around the key until the teeth of it press into my palm, and even then I don’t move.

Every surface is a version of a life I wasn’t supposed to have. The tailored blazers on the rack by the door, sorted by color — dove grey to charcoal to black, then navy, then the warmer tones. Someone organized that. Cara organized that, probably on a Sunday with a glass of wine and a podcast she’d never recommend to me. The planner open on the kitchen counter, Cara’s precise handwriting filling every box — meetings, fittings, calls with the Alderton estate team. Her letters slope at a consistent angle, each word given exactly the space it needs. I always wrote like I was running out of room. The framed art on the walls — galleries she liked, nothing she made herself, because Cara’s talents were social, not studio.

We had the same face and almost nothing else, and I am standing in the proof of it.

I uncurl my fingers. I put the key in my pocket and go in.

The closet takes me an hour. I pull everything out, lay it across the bed, try to organize by occasion because that’s apparently what I’m doing now — studying my dead sister’s wardrobe like it’s a syllabus. I handle each piece carefully at first, then less carefully, because careful feels like pretending this is normal and nothing about this is normal. The architectural tailoring, the heels nested in their labeled boxes, the silk blouses folded with tissue paper between them. Nothing with paint on it. Nothing worn in. I pick up a cream blouse and check the cuffs twice, almost hoping. They’re pristine.

I set it down and press both hands flat against the bedspread for a moment, just to feel something that isn’t fabric.

I find her planner and sit on the bed with it, reading backwards through the weeks before the accident. The Alderton meeting. The fitting. The dinner with Ford Calloway, noted simply as FC dinner — Quattro, 7pm, the ink slightly heavier on that line, like she’d pressed down. I flip further back, my thumb moving in short arcs, the pages flicking against my nail.

Fourteen months back.

The entries change. Shorter. More coded. A series of initials I don’t recognize—HB, RS, DP — appearing in the margins, circled with a single loop. A date underlined three times in red: Oct 14. Whatever happened on October 14, Cara thought it was significant enough to underline twice more the next week, the red pen biting in deeper the second time, the third time, until the paper nearly scored through.

I press my fingertip to that date. The ink is long dry but I press anyway.

I set the planner aside and start on the nightstand.

The nightstand looks normal at first—a novel face-down, a lip balm worn to the nub, a charger coiled too neatly to be an accident. But under the novel, taped flat against the wood with the kind of clear tape you’d use on a package, is a phone.

Not Cara’s phone. Her phone is with me. I can unlock it with my own face, which has never felt stranger than it does in this apartment. But this phone—I work the tape up slowly, peeling from the corner so it doesn’t take the finish with it—this phone is a burner. The cheap kind, pay-as-you-go, a model three generations old. I turn it over in my hands. The screen is cracked across the corner, a long diagonal split like something dropped it from a height.

I power it on. My breath is very even. I’m making it even.

It asks for a PIN. I try Cara’s birthday. Wrong. I try the year our dad left and the screen opens.

She always used that year for things she wanted to hide from our mother and remember herself. My throat does something I ignore.

The message thread is encrypted — most of it. Chunks of symbols, numbers running sideways, blocks of text that look like a keyboard malfunction. I scroll through slowly, tilting the cracked screen toward the grey morning light coming through the window, and I can’t read any of it except the timestamps. Someone was careful. Someone was careful for a long time.

But I can read the last message.

It came in at 11:48 p.m. on the night of the accident. Not encrypted — plain text, like whoever sent it didn’t have time to run it through the usual channel, or didn’t care anymore about covering tracks because they were panicking. My eyes move across the words once. Then I read them again. Then I set the phone down on the bed next to the planner and Cara’s silk blouses, and I sit very still with my hands in my lap and my eyes on the window.

They know. Don’t go home.

My sister got this message at 11:48 p.m. She was dead by 12:14 a.m., on a road that leads directly to her apartment.

She went home anyway.

I don’t know if she didn’t get the message in time, or if she didn’t believe it, or if she was already in the car when it came through, the phone buzzing unheard in her bag while the road came up fast. I pick the phone back up and look at the timestamp again like it’ll give me something different this time.

It doesn’t.

My sister was warned and she died anyway, and someone out there is still walking around having gotten exactly what they wanted.

I think about what Lenora said in the morgue hallway. The only person who can get close enough to find out what happened is someone already inside Rhys Alderton’s life.

I look at the message one more time. Then I put the phone in my bag and stand up.

I look around the apartment — the blazers on their rack, the planner with its red ink, the shoes in their archived boxes — and I understand, for the first time, that I’m not deciding whether to do this.

I’ve already decided.

I’m deciding whether to admit that I’ve decided.

I reach into the closet and pull out a blazer in charcoal grey, the kind Cara wore to meetings that required a particular kind of authority, and I lay it over my arm. The lining is cold against my wrist. I stand there holding it, and my hand is shaking, and it doesn’t stop, and I don’t put the blazer down.