My twin sister showed up the night before my husband’s funeral to gloat about ruining my life. She didn’t know our entire family was listening from behind her. She also didn’t know I was three weeks pregnant.
She had found out only weeks earlier and had been texting me cruel messages ever since, not because she cared that she was about to become an aunt, but because she wanted fresh ammunition to hurt me with. She had no idea that this ammunition would come back to destroy her instead. “Stress eating again?” she said as she stumbled through my front door, completely uninvited.
“That dress barely fit you last month. Good thing James isn’t alive to see you letting yourself go.”
I kept my face neutral even though my stomach turned. I could have cried.
Really cried. Like all the other times she kicked me when I was already down. But this time, I chose strategy.
“You know what’s funny?” I said softly. “Even after all the bad luck the universe gave me, I still ended up happier than you.”
Her eye twitched. I had hit a nerve.
She never knew when to stop once she started talking. Ruining my life had always made her feel powerful, and she was glowing with it now. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she said, sloshing wine in the bottle she brought with her.
“You think all your bad luck was the universe? Poor, pathetic Katie with her terrible life.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, making my voice small and fragile on purpose. “I don’t understand.”
That was the moment I had been waiting for.
“Well, for starters, Michael didn’t ghost you in senior year.” Her voice slurred with wine and triumph. “I slept with him in your bed wearing your perfume, then convinced him you’d been cheating the whole time. He still can’t look at either of us.”
“That’s impossible,” I whispered, fake tears gathering in my eyes.
“You were at Mom’s that weekend. You were helping with her surgery.”
“Gosh, you really are slow.”
She was enjoying herself now, thinking we were alone, thinking I was already broken and had no idea I was only minutes away from taking everything important from her. “Remember when you lost the baby at sixteen weeks?” she said, practically glowing.
“Weird how that happened right after I made you that special smoothie.”
The story doesn’t end here – it continues on the next page.
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