POV: Mara
The wine bottle was cold in my hands.
That should have been my first warning.
I'd been standing outside Seth's apartment door for almost a full minute, and I hadn't knocked yet. I kept telling myself it was because I wanted to get the surprise right — to time the knock perfectly, to have the smile ready, to look like the kind of woman who shows up at her fiancé's door on a Tuesday night with his favorite wine just because she loves him.
But my hand wouldn't move.
Knock, Mara. Just knock.
I knocked.
Nothing.
I pressed my ear to the door. Music — low, barely there, the kind Seth played when he was in a good mood. So he was home. He was just not answering.
My stomach did something small and unpleasant. I ignored it.
I had the spare key. He gave it to me three months ago with a ribbon on it, like a joke, except his eyes were serious. "For emergencies," he'd said. I'd laughed and asked what kind of emergencies. He'd kissed my forehead instead of answering.
I told myself this counted.
The key turned. The door opened. The music got louder.
---
The apartment was warm and dim. Two glasses on the coffee table. Two. I counted them twice because the first time my brain refused the information.
He has a friend over, I told myself. That's all. Friends exist. People have friends.
The bedroom door was half open.
I could see the edge of the bed. A lamp casting orange light across the floor. Shadows moving.
My feet moved before my brain gave them permission. I crossed the living room in four steps. I pushed the bedroom door open with my fingertips.
Seth spun around.
His face went through five different expressions in about two seconds — shock, guilt, fury, calculation, and then fury again, bigger this time, the kind that attacks first so it doesn't have to explain itself.
"What are you doing here?" His voice was a whip crack. "I didn't — you can't just walk in—"
"I have a key," I said. My voice came out completely calm. I didn't understand that. Nothing inside me was calm.
"Mara—"
"I have a key," I said again, louder this time, because saying it a second time felt like the only thing keeping me standing.
His hand came up fast. I didn't see it until it connected.
The slap knocked the world sideways. My cheek exploded with heat. The wine bottle slipped in my fingers and I grabbed it tighter on pure reflex — and then something in me went very, very quiet.
Not the sad kind of quiet.
The dangerous kind.
I looked at my hand holding the bottle. I looked at Seth's face — twisted, breathing hard, already moving toward me like he was going to do it again.
I swung.
---
The bottle didn't break. It connected with his shoulder and he stumbled back hard into the dresser. Something crashed. He yelled.
But the scream that followed wasn't his.
It came from the bed.
A woman's scream — sharp and terrified and cutting straight through the noise. I spun toward it. The sheets were tangled. A hand. Dark hair spread across the pillow. A face turning toward me, eyes wide, mouth open.
My brain stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped. Like someone yanked a cord from the wall.
Because I knew that face.
I knew the small upward tilt of that nose. I knew the way the left eyebrow had a tiny scar cutting through it from a fall off a bicycle when we were seven years old. I knew the shape of those hands and the sound of that voice even screaming.
I knew her the way you know something that has been sewn into you since before you were old enough to remember.
"Mara—" Seth was saying something behind me. I couldn't hear him.
The woman in the bed was staring at me. Her chest was heaving. Her eyes were filling with tears.
And she said my name.
In a voice I had cried myself to sleep hearing for five years. In a voice I had begged God to let me hear one more time at a funeral where the casket was closed because there was apparently nothing left to show.
In my dead sister's voice.
"Mara. Let me explain."
---
My legs were moving. I don't remember deciding to move. I was just suddenly in the hallway, then at the front door, then outside in the cold air that hit my burning cheek like a hand pressing an ice pack to a wound.
I walked. Fast. Then faster.
She's dead. The thought kept repeating like a skip in a song. Lena is dead. I watched them lower a casket. I held my mother while she shook. I kept her bedroom door closed for two years because I couldn't walk past it. She is dead. She has been dead for five years. That was not—
My phone buzzed.
I looked down at it, still walking, still not breathing properly.
A text from my mother.
Four words.
Come home. We'll explain.
I stopped walking.
I read it again.
Come home. We'll explain.
Not — What happened? Are you okay? Seth just called—
Not — Mara, we just heard—
We'll explain.
Like they already knew what I'd just seen. Like they had been waiting for this moment. Like my entire world detonating in the last ten minutes had been a scheduled event on someone else's calendar.
My mother knew.
My mother had known.
The phone buzzed again.
This time it was my father.
I looked at his name on the screen for a long time.
Then I looked up at the street around me — dark, quiet, nobody watching — and I did something I had never done in my twenty-six years of being the steady one, the reliable one, the daughter who held everything together.
I screamed.
One short, sharp sound into the empty night.
Then I kept walking.
I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know what came next. I only knew one thing with every single cell in my body:
Everything I had ever been told about my life was a lie.
And somewhere behind me, in that warm apartment, my dead sister was still breathing.
She was alive.
She had always been alive.
And my parents knew.