Chapter 3 — How to Wear Someone Else's Skin
956 Words
Calla POV
The paint comes off slowly.
I'm bent over the hotel bathroom sink at 7 a.m., working a nail brush under my fingernails, and the water running off my hands is this pale terracotta pink — the color I was using last Thursday when my life was still mine. It swirls down the drain and I watch it go.
There's an ink stain on the inside of my right wrist that's been there for two years. I scrub at it for a full minute before I accept that it lives there now. Cara was immaculate. I already have one problem.
My mother is waiting in the suite's main room with a printout and a hotel notepad, and when I come out of the bathroom she looks up and says, "You're six minutes late," which is the most Lenora sentence she has ever said to me.
"Good morning to you too," I say, dropping onto the edge of the couch. "What's the notepad for?"
"Cara laughed with her mouth closed." She says it the way you say the sky is blue, simple fact, no interpretation. "You laugh with your teeth. You'll need to adjust that immediately."
I look at her. "We're starting with laughing."
"We're starting with everything." She uncaps a pen. "Cara took her coffee black, one sugar…"
"I know how Cara took her coffee."
"Do you know how she held her wineglass?" Lenora sets the pen down. "By the stem, two fingers, not the bowl. Do you know that she touched the base of her own throat when she was nervous, never her hair? That she walked through doorways slightly ahead of whoever she was with because she was trained to own the room on entry?"
I don't answer, because I don't know any of those things, and the fact that my mother catalogued them like tactical data is doing something to my chest that I don't want to examine.
"We have forty-eight hours," she says. "Pay attention."
So I pay attention.
Two hours of this. Lenora runs through Cara's social calendar, her speech patterns, the particular way she deflected questions she didn't want to answer — a small smile, a redirect, never a flat no because flat nos left traces. She tells me Cara had a standing Thursday call with the Alderton estate manager about the house renovation schedule and that I should cancel it the first week and cite a headache, then reschedule with the caveat that I wanted to personally oversee the changes.
"Cara loved interior decisions," Lenora explains. "She used them to control the domestic space. Rhys was indifferent to the house, so she owned it entirely. It was the one place she had complete authority."
"What about him?" I say. "Rhys. Tell me about him. What's he actually like?"
Lenora pauses. Just barely — a half-second hesitation she covers immediately. "Controlled. Ambitious. Very private."
"Okay, that describes half of Austin. I mean what's he like with her. With Cara."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"They weren't close," she says.
"They were engaged for five years."
"Yes." She picks up the pen again, uncaps it, doesn't write anything. "Their engagement was managed primarily by assistants. The logistics — the house, the public appearances, the press — all of it was handled through intermediaries. They had very little direct contact."
I stare at her. "They never…" I stop. "Are you telling me they were never…"
"Intimate?" She says the word like it's a scheduling category. "No. That was always the arrangement for after the wedding."
I sit back against the couch cushions and think about what that means — not for the deception, but for me, specifically, walking into a marriage as a woman this man has barely spoken to.
There is no behavioral map. There is no reference. If he reaches for me, if he expects something, if the first night in that house is something I haven't accounted for…
"He won't notice the difference," Lenora says, watching my face. "He barely noticed Cara."
Something happens in my chest when she says it. Not relief. Not reassurance. Something sharp and contrary and entirely irrational, because why would I care — why would it matter to me whether some tech billionaire noticed my sister or not — except that I've been in Cara's apartment and I've seen how she lived, the precise careful container of a life she built for someone else's approval, and the idea that she offered all of that and the man she offered it to barely noticed makes me want to break something.
"That," I say, my voice coming out very quiet, "is the most dangerous thing you've said to me."
Lenora frowns. "I said it to reassure you."
"I know." I pick up the printout from the coffee table — Cara's social obligations for the next three months, the Alderton household staff names and functions, the layout of the estate. "That's why it's dangerous."
She's watching me like she doesn't understand, and she doesn't, because Lenora has always assumed that what she finds comforting is what everyone finds comforting.
I look at the estate layout. The main house. The east wing. The study.
Wherever Cara hid that evidence, it's in one of these rooms.
I'm going to walk into this man's home and wear his dead fiancée's name, and I'm going to find what my sister died to build, and I'm going to do it before whoever sent that message realizes I exist.
He won't notice the difference, she said.
He barely noticed Cara.
I fold the printout and tuck it into my bag next to the burner phone.
I hope she's right. And for a reason I can't name yet, something tells me she's not.
- Writer
