Talia's POV
"She's not my wife. She never were." The words hit me like ice water.
I stood in the doorway of our apartment with the grocery bags still hooked over my forearms, staring at Damien's back. He was on the phone, laughing in that low, easy way I hadn't heard from him in years. The sound scraped against my ribs, pulling at old wounds I hadn't even known were there. The hallway behind me felt colder suddenly, the air thick with the scent of the building's old carpet and the faint trace of rain from outside. I had just come up from the market two blocks away, my arms aching from the weight of everything I thought we needed for a special dinner. Five years together, and I still planned these things like they mattered, like they built something solid.
"No, Bianca, listen," he said. "She thinks the anniversary is next week. I pushed the date forward so she'd be out of the house today." A pause while he listened. Then, "Of course I'm sure. I never registered the marriage. It's not legal. It's not real."
My fingers went numb. The bag slipped. Glass shattered across the floor, olive oil spreading in a dark pool that smelled like my mother's kitchen, the recipe I'd been saving for our anniversary dinner. The sound echoed in the small space, sharp and final, like something breaking that couldn't be fixed. I watched the golden liquid seep out, mixing with bits of shattered jar, and thought about how my mother used to pour it over fresh bread while telling stories about her own life back home.
Five years of believing his word was enough, of cooking for him, of sleeping beside him, of calling him my husband in my head and out loud. I had bought the ingredients that morning with a lightness in my step, humming to myself in the aisles, imagining his face when he tasted the meal. Now it all pooled at my feet, ruined and spreading.
Damien spun around. His face drained of color. "Talia—"
I didn't move. The oil crept toward my shoes. I watched him set the phone down without ending the call, the screen still lit with her name. Bianca. My dead sister. Alive and on the other end of the line, laughing with the man I'd given everything to. The phone's glow seemed too bright in the dim room, casting shadows on the walls we had painted together one weekend, choosing the color from swatches at the hardware store like it was the start of something permanent. I remembered how he had held my hand that day, his grip firm, promising we would fill these walls with memories. The lie of it all pressed down on me now, heavy and suffocating.
The bookstore came back to me in a rush, the day we met. I had reached for the same copy of The Remains of the Day, my fingers brushing the spine just as his did. "Great taste," he'd said, smiling that slow smile that made the air feel thinner. I fell right there, in the aisle between fiction and history, because he looked at me like I was the only person in the room. He bought the book for me. We walked out together into the afternoon sun, talking about the story's quiet sadness, how it captured the ache of unspoken things. We spent the rest of that day wandering the city streets, stopping for coffee at a small cart where he paid and insisted on carrying my bag.
Five years later and I was still the woman who believed every promise he made without paper or witnesses. I had moved in with him after six months, leaving my small studio behind, telling myself that love didn't need legal stamps to be real. We built routines: Sunday mornings with the paper, his hand on my back as I cooked, late nights where he would pull me close and whisper that I was everything. All of it without question, because his word had felt like enough.
Now the oil reached my toes, cold and slick. Damien stepped forward, hands raised like he could catch the moment before it broke further. "Let me explain."
"Explain what?" My voice came out quiet. Terrifyingly quiet. "That our marriage is fiction? That my sister—my dead sister—is alive? That you've been planning this behind my back while I cooked the meals and waited for you to come home?" The questions piled up in my mind, each one sharper than the last. How long had Bianca been back? Had she called him, or had he sought her out? What other secrets filled the gaps in our days together, the evenings he came home late with excuses about work or traffic?
"How do you know about Bianca?"
"I heard. I heard everything."
He moved closer, and the smell of his cologne hit me, the same one he'd worn on our first real date. I had thought it meant he wanted to impress me. Now it just meant he had routines he kept separate from me. The cologne mixed with the oil on the floor, creating a sickening blend that turned my stomach. I could see the faint lines around his eyes, the ones that crinkled when he laughed at my jokes, now tight with panic. His shirt was the one I had ironed that morning, the blue one he liked for its softness.
"Talia, please. It's complicated. Bianca and I... we were over years ago. She left. I thought she was gone for good. Then she came back and I didn't know how to tell you. The marriage thing, it was never about you. It was paperwork, taxes, all of it. I was going to fix it."
My mind raced through the last five years. Every excuse, every delay, every time Damien said a wedding ceremony wasn’t necessary. Love is enough, he’d told me. We don’t need paperwork to prove what we have. And I had believed him. God, I had believed.
“Five years,” I murmured. “You let me believe I was your wife for five years.”
“I never said—”
“Don’t.” The word was sharp enough to make him flinch.
“You called me your wife,” I said, voice rising slightly. “You introduced me as your wife. You let my family call you their son-in-law.”
Damien rubbed his temples. “It was easier that way.”
The words landed like a slap. “Easier,” I repeated.
“For everyone.”
“No, for you,” I corrected quietly.
I looked at him, really looked, and for the first time in five years the love I had carried like a second skin felt like dead weight. Calculation took its place. I saw the apartment behind him, the life I had built inside these walls, and I saw how little of it was actually mine. The lease was in his name. The savings were in his account. Even the name Talia Voss had never been changed on anything official because there had been no ceremony, no certificate, nothing except his word. I turned and walked out.
The door was already open from when I came in. Damien grabbed my arm above the elbow, fingers digging in. “Remove your hand.”
Damien frowned. “Talia, you’re overreacting.”
Her voice didn’t change. “Remove your hand.”
“No.” I slammed the door on his arm, hard. The wood connected with bone and he yelled, a raw sound that echoed down the hallway. He released me. I was already running, groceries forgotten, oil still spreading behind me. The elevator button lit up under my thumb. I pressed it again and again, heart hammering so loud it drowned out the sound of him calling my name from the apartment.
The doors slid open. Inside stood my brothers, Marcus and Elliot, both of them looking surprised to see me. Behind them sat two suitcases. The tags faced outward, clear enough in the fluorescent light. Bianca's initials were stitched into the leather in neat gold thread. And suddenly I realized something terrifying. Everyone in this building—Damien, mer brothers, the luggage, Bianca. They had all been expecting someone today. Just not me.
Talia's POV
Going somewhere, little sister?”
The words came from Marcus as he stepped out of the elevator first, his voice smooth like it always was when he wanted to control a room. I stared at the luggage behind him and Elliot, those suitcases with Bianca's gold-stitched initials staring back at me like a confession I couldn't unread. My brothers looked surprised for only a second before their faces shifted into that familiar mix of concern and calculation, the same expressions they'd worn at every family gathering where I was the one left out of the real conversations. The hallway felt smaller suddenly, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like they were mocking the silence that followed.
Marcus tried again, all charm and concern. "Talia, you look upset. What happened?"
"You tell me." My voice came out like steel, colder than the oil still drying on my shoes from the apartment above. "Where are you going?"
Elliot shifted his weight, his hands stuffed in his pockets like he could hide the truth there. "Business trip."
"With Bianca's luggage?" I asked, and the silence that followed confessed everything without a single word. It stretched between us, heavy and thick, filling the space where explanations should have been. I could feel my pulse in my throat, the same way it had pounded when I slammed the door on Damien's arm minutes earlier. The brothers I had trusted with every secret since childhood stood there with proof that they had chosen sides long ago.
A flashback hit me then, sharp and unwanted. Five years ago, at Bianca's so-called funeral. The closed casket had been draped in white lilies, the church filled with people murmuring about the tragedy of a young woman gone too soon. Marcus and Elliot had sobbed openly, their arms around me as they whispered promises that they'd always protect me, that family meant sticking together no matter what. I had believed them, crying into their shoulders while the priest spoke of eternal rest and the loss that would never heal. Lies, all of it. They had known she was alive, had probably helped her disappear with whatever man or scheme she had cooked up. The memory twisted now, turning their tears into performances and their comfort into a shield for the real story they kept from me.
I laughed, and the sound was ugly, broken, real in a way that made Elliot flinch. "She's alive. You knew. All of you knew."
Marcus reached for my shoulder, his fingers hovering like he could still play the big brother role. I flinched away like he was fire, the contact too much after everything that had already burned me that day. "Talia, it's complicated—"
"Complicated?" I stepped into the elevator with them, pressing the lobby button hard enough that my nail bent. "Uncomplicate it for me. Now."
The doors closed, trapping us in that small metal box with the suitcases and the weight of years of deception. Elliot cracked first, his voice low and defensive. "Bianca made mistakes. She left, okay? She ran off with someone Damien was involved with. It was messy. She needed time. We gave her time."
"Five years," I said, the number tasting like ash. "You gave her five years while I cooked meals and believed I had a husband and a family that cared. Five years of thinking she was dead, of visiting her empty grave on holidays because that's what sisters do for each other."
"She's our sister too," Marcus said, his charm cracking at the edges.
"And I'm not?" The elevator stopped with a ding, the doors sliding open to the lobby full of people hurrying through their normal lives. I stepped out, turned back to face them one last time. "I was your sister first. I was his wife first. And you all chose her. Every single day for five years, you chose her over me, keeping her secrets, covering her tracks, letting me live a lie while she lived the life that was supposed to be mine."
I walked through the lobby without waiting for an answer, the click of my shoes on the tile echoing like accusations. Outside, rain had started, cold and sudden and drenching. It soaked through my clothes in seconds, but I didn't care. I walked. Blocks turned into miles, my feet carrying me through puddles and past strangers who glanced away from the soaked woman with red eyes and nothing left to lose. No destination mattered, just the movement, the way each step put distance between me and the apartment, the elevator, the brothers who had smiled at funerals they knew were fake.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, the vibration insistent against my hip. I pulled it out, rain blurring the screen as I read the messages. Damien first: ‘Come home. We need to talk.’ Like home was still a place that existed for me. Then my brothers, their texts piling up: ‘Where are you? Let's discuss this rationally.’ As if rationality could fix the hole they had carved into my life. And then a new number, one I didn't recognize but knew instantly. Bianca: ‘I know you're upset. But I'm not the villain here. He never loved you. He told me. From the beginning, it was me.’
I stopped walking, standing in the middle of the sidewalk as rain streamed down my face and mixed with the tears I couldn't hold back anymore. The worst part was that I believed her message. I had always suspected it in the quiet moments, the way Damien looked at old photos in the drawer he thought I never opened, the way he went quiet whenever Bianca's name came up in conversation, the way our so-called marriage felt like a waiting room where I was just passing time until the real thing arrived. I wasn't a wife. I was a placeholder, a stand-in for the sister who had left and come back to claim what she wanted.
The rain pounded harder, soaking into my skin until I shivered, but the cold inside ran deeper. Five years of cooking meals from recipes my mother had taught me, five years of falling asleep next to him and wondering why his touch sometimes felt like an obligation. All of it for nothing. The city moved around me, cars splashing through intersections and people ducking under awnings, but I stood there frozen, the phone screen dimming in my hand as another message from Bianca popped up. She didn't need to say more. The truth was already there, sharp and final.
My feet started moving again without my say-so, carrying me across another block where the lights turned red and green in a rhythm I didn't follow. I thought about the bookstore where it all began, how Damien had smiled at me like I was the only one who mattered, how he had bought that copy of The Remains of the Day and walked with me for hours talking about regret and unspoken words. Had he been thinking of her even then? Had every promise he made been a rehearsal for the day she returned? The brothers had known, had helped keep the secret, and now they were heading off with her luggage like it was the most natural thing in the world. I had been the fool in the middle, the one who paid and cooked and believed while the real family played out their plans elsewhere.
The rain blurred everything, turning streetlights into smears of color, but I kept walking, each step heavier than the last as the weight of it all settled in my chest. A car swerved. Tires screamed. I looked up, but it was oo late. Headlights. Impact. Darkness.
Talia's POV
White light. Beeping. Pain.
I woke to the steady rhythm of machines, each beep slicing through the fog in my head like a dull blade. My body felt heavy, pinned down by invisible weights, every breath pulling against bruised ribs and something deeper that throbbed low in my abdomen. The sheets were stiff against my skin, the air thick with antiseptic and the faint hum of fluorescent lights overhead. A doctor stood at the foot of the bed, young and handsome in a way that seemed out of place in the sterile room, his tired eyes holding something familiar, like a half-remembered face from a crowd. He watched me with a mix of relief and caution, clipboard in hand.
"You're awake. Good. You gave us quite a scare."
I tried to speak, but my throat was raw, the words scraping out as nothing more than a dry rasp. My tongue felt thick, coated in something metallic.
"Don't try to talk yet," he said, stepping closer. "You've been unconscious for two days." He checked the monitors, adjusting a line taped to my arm. "I'm Dr. Chen. I found your emergency contact list in your phone. We called your husband. Your brothers. No one came."
I closed my eyes. Of course they didn't. The truth settled like another layer of ache, heavier than the bruises blooming across my skin. Two days gone, and the people I had once called family had left me here, machines breathing for me while they moved on with their lives. The beeping continued, steady and indifferent, marking time I couldn't get back.
A brief flash pulled me under, uninvited. Five years ago, a different hospital, the sharp scent of the same disinfectant filling the air as my mother lay in a narrow bed, her hand cold in mine. Marcus and Elliot had stood on either side, holding my hands, their voices low and steady. "We're family," they had said. "We'll always be here." Elliot had squeezed my fingers when the monitors flatlined, Marcus pulling me into a hug that smelled of aftershave and false promises. I had believed them then, the way I believed everything back before the lies stacked too high. Now that memory twisted, turning their words into echoes of the same betrayal that had left me alone in this bed.
Dr. Chen pulled up a chair, the legs scraping softly against the linoleum. "You had internal bleeding. We did emergency surgery. You'll recover physically. But..." He hesitated, his eyes meeting mine with a gentleness that made the cold in my chest spread faster.
"But what?" The words came out hoarse, barely above a whisper, but I forced them through the dryness.
He met my eyes fully, no evasion left. "You were pregnant. I'm sorry. We couldn't save the baby."
The words hung in the air like smoke, thick and choking. I stared at the ceiling tiles, counting the small perforations as if they could anchor me. I hadn't known. Or had I? The tiredness that had dragged at my limbs for weeks, the sudden waves of emotion that made simple meals feel overwhelming, the way my body had felt off-kilter even before the rain and the accident. I had chalked it all up to stress, to the slow unraveling of a life built on sand. A baby. Damien's baby. Gone now, taken in the impact and the surgery that followed, leaving only this hollow space inside me where something new had started to grow.
I didn't cry. The tears wouldn't come, not after everything. Something inside had gone cold, a frost spreading from my chest outward, numbing the edges of the pain until it felt distant, like a story happening to someone else. I asked for my phone, my voice cracking on the request. Dr. Chen nodded and handed it over without argument, the screen still cracked from the fall but functional enough.
Social media pulled me in like a current. Bianca's profile was new, fresh, public in a way that screamed of reclaimed territory. Photos from the past two days filled the feed. A brunch, sunlight slanting across a table set with pastries and coffee, the caption reading "Reunited with my favorite brothers." Marcus and Elliot smiled in the frame, their arms around her, faces open and relaxed in a way they never were around me. Another photo, a dinner that night, the caption "Home at last. With the man who never stopped waiting." Damien sat there with his arm around Bianca, his smile the one he used to aim at me in the early days, the slow curve that made the room feel smaller. They leaned into each other, glasses raised, the table cluttered with the remnants of a meal I would have cooked if things had been different.
I zoomed in on Damien's face, studying it like a text I needed to translate. The lines around his eyes crinkled with real happiness, the kind that reached deep and stayed there. While I lay in this hospital bed, our baby dead inside me before it could even begin, he was having dinner with my sister. The coldness spread from my chest to my limbs, to my fingertips, turning everything numb. I wasn't sad. Sadness would have been a relief, something warm and human to hold onto. This was something worse, a flat emptiness that settled like ice over every memory of the last five years. I had been the placeholder, the one who filled the space until Bianca returned, and now even the child I hadn't known I carried was gone, another loss they wouldn't mourn.
The coldness inside me deepened, spreading from my chest through my ribs and down into my legs, making the blankets feel like nothing more than thin paper. I shifted slightly in the bed, wincing as the movement pulled at the stitches I couldn't see but could feel pulling taut beneath the bandages. My body was a map of damage now: the impact from the car had left bruises blooming purple and black across my hips and thighs, the surgery had taken what little remained of the pregnancy I hadn't even known existed, and the two days of unconsciousness had left my mouth dry and my head pounding with a steady rhythm that synced to the beeping machines.
The baby. The thought looped back, sharp and insistent. I hadn't felt any different, or at least not in a way that stood out from the constant low-level dread of the past few weeks. Tired, yes, but that came from the long hours at work and the nights spent waiting for Damien to come home. Now it was gone, a life that had started without my notice and ended without my consent, taken in the blur of headlights and the chaos of the operating room.
I placed a hand over my stomach, feeling the bandages through the thin gown, the skin beneath tender and swollen. No tears came, just that spreading frost that numbed the edges of what should have been grief. Instead, there was only the calculation of loss, the tally of everything I had given and everything that had been taken in return. Five years of my life reduced to this hospital bed, these machines, and a phone full of proof that the family I thought I had was an illusion crafted by people who chose her every time.
The door clicked softly, and Dr. Chen returned, his footsteps quiet on the linoleum. He carried a small cup of water and set it on the tray beside me. "There's someone here to see you," he said, his voice low and measured. "He's been here every day since the accident. Waiting."
I looked past him toward the doorway. A man stood there, tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair that had a few streaks of gray at the temples now. His eyes held mine across the room, familiar in a way that cut through the fog of pain and medication. It was Ethan, the man from years ago, before Damien, from the time when I still thought the world held possibilities beyond the ones I had settled for. He had been the one who offered steady presence without demands. We had drifted apart when I moved in with Damien, the pull of that new relationship too strong to resist, but seeing him now brought a flicker of something warm against the ice.
He stepped forward, his hands in his pockets, his expression a mix of concern and quiet recognition. "Hello, Talia."
