Take My Sister, I'll Take Your GrandDaddy

The wedding dress hangs on the closet door, white and impossible, and I can't stop touching it.

Lace cool under my fingertips. Pearl beading like small teeth. Twelve more hours and I'll wear this down a candlelit aisle, and Julian Blackwood will turn from the altar with that quiet half-smile he keeps only for me, and twenty-six years of being not-quite-anyone's-real-daughter will dissolve like sugar in warm tea.

'You're going to be a Blackwood, Aurora. Tomorrow. You.'

I drift to the dresser and pick up the silver-framed photograph he gave me last Christmas. Us at the house in the Hamptons. His arm slung over my shoulder, sun caught gold in his hair, my head tucked under his jaw like I belong there. Because I do. Because for the first time in my whole carefully behaved life, somebody chose me.

There are six other frames lined up along the marble of the vanity. The first one I bought myself the year I turned sixteen, the year I realized my mother kept no photographs of me on her dresser. I started a little collection just for me. Look. Somebody, somewhere, on some day, was glad you existed. Now they're all Julian. Us at the Met gala. Us at his sister's wedding in Tuscany. Us laughing at the back of a yacht in Saint-Tropez, my hair a mess of salt and sun. He never took bad photos. He never took a single bad photo in his entire ridiculous life.

I press the latest frame to my sternum and laugh, a small embarrassed sound.

'God, you're a mess. You're a happy, ugly-crying mess.'

The clock reads 11:47. Two doors down the corridor, he's awake. I know he is. He sleeps terribly the night before anything important.presentations, board meetings, our engagement party. He'll be reading something dense and unreadable, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose, foot bouncing under the sheets.

I want to see him.

It's bad luck. His mother would lose her teeth. Every wedding magazine in the country would tut at me. I don't care. I want to lay my palm against his chest and feel his heart and whisper the thing I've been chewing on all week:

I'm scared. I'm so happy. Don't ever let me go.

I pad down to the kitchen and heat milk on the stove the way my mother used to before she stopped doing anything except sitting in the conservatory and pretending I wasn't her favorite mistake. Knot of honey. Crack of cinnamon. He hates store-bought sleep aids. He'll smile at me over the rim of the mug and tease me for being a grandmother in a twenty-six-year-old's body, and I'll curl up at the foot of his bed and pretend I'm only staying five minutes.

I carry the mug down the corridor.

The house breathes around me.marble cold through my bare feet, sconces dialed down to amber, my white silk robe whispering against my calves with each step. I'm humming. Bridezilla, you swore you wouldn't be that woman. I'm humming anyway.

His door is at the end of the hall.

It's open.

Not all the way. A finger's width of light spills onto the runner.

I slow.

There's a sound coming through that crack. A sound my brain takes a long second to refuse to identify. Wet. Rhythmic. A woman's voice broken into small panting gasps that climb and climb.

The mug suddenly weighs forty pounds.

"No."

That's not a thought. I say it out loud, very quietly, to absolutely no one.

'It's the TV. He watches things at night sometimes when he can't sleep, it's the TV, you idiot, walk away, don't ruin tomorrow, don't be.'

But I'm walking. I'm walking and I can't feel my feet.

I push the door.

The bed.

The bed Julian and I picked out together at that snobbish little showroom on Madison, the one where the saleswoman kept calling me ma'am. The bed I haven't been allowed to share with him because his mother said we have to do this right.

He is on top of her.

He is on top of her.

Isla. My half-sister. The girl whose hair I braided when she was nine and crying because our father forgot her recital again. Isla. In my fiancé's bed. One bare leg hooked around the back of his thigh. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow that should be mine. Her mouth open and slack and her eyes.

Her eyes find me.

She doesn't scream. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't even pull for the sheet.

She smiles.

Slow. Curling. Like a cat that has finally cornered the bird.

Julian still hasn't seen me. He's bent over her neck murmuring something low and stupid and tender, and Isla holds my gaze for one more obscene, deliberate beat before she lifts a hand and lays it against his cheek and says, sweet as buttercream:

"Jules. Baby. We have company."

Julian's whole body locks.

He turns his head.

And then he sees me, and every drop of color falls out of his face like a curtain ripping off a rod.

The mug slips from my hand.

It explodes against the marble in a sound that takes the whole room with it, ceramic skittering, milk spreading in a long pale fan across dark stone. Heat splashes my ankles. I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I am not inside my body anymore.

"Aurora." Julian lunges for the sheet, drags it up over the two of them in one ragged motion. "Aurora. Aurora, oh God, this isn't.it isn't what."

It isn't what, Julian?

It isn't what?

I am not crying. That's the strange thing. I am standing in a spreading pool of warm milk in my bare feet with a piece of broken ceramic biting into my heel, and my eyes are dry. My chest is dry. There is nothing inside me except a roar like a freeway in a storm, a sound made of every promise this man ever pressed into the hollow under my ear.

Isla doesn't reach for the sheet. She lets it slip off one bare shoulder and just.looks at me. Tilts her chin. Then, slow as honey, she burrows in closer against Julian's chest, lays her cheek against his collarbone, and sighs.

Julian flinches like she's branded him. He tries to slide away. Her hand on his chest stops him.

"Aurora, please," he babbles. "Please. Listen. Listen to me. I can explain. I can.just.Aurora."

I can't speak. My mouth has forgotten how. My tongue is a piece of dead meat in my head.

"Jules," Isla murmurs, eyes never leaving mine, voice low and almost loving, "tell her. Tell her everything's going to be fine."

'She knew. She knew I'd come down here tonight. She left the door open.'

The thought is the clearest thing in the whole roaring room.

She left the door open for me.

Julian flounders. "Aurora, baby, please, just.just come in, close the door, let's.let's talk about this like."

Baby.

He calls me baby with my sister's leg still hooked around his.

Something in my chest folds in half.

I take one step back.

Just one. My heel slides in milk. The shard of ceramic shifts. I feel a thin hot line of blood open across my sole, and I register this the way you might register that someone else, in another room, has hurt themselves.

Isla's smile widens.

"Aurora," she purrs, "you're bleeding all over the floor."

She says it like she's been waiting twenty-three years to say it. She probably has.

Julian sees the blood. His mouth opens and closes. He looks at the milk, the ceramic, the rusty smear my heel is making in it, and there's a fraction of a second where I see something almost human cross his face.real horror, real shame.and then Isla shifts against him and slides one possessive palm flat across his bare chest and the human in him retreats again. Disappears. Gone.

"Get a towel," he mutters at her, weakly.

"I'm naked, Jules."

"Get a towel."

She doesn't move. She watches me bleed.

I open my mouth.

Nothing comes out.

I stand in the doorway in my white silk robe, in my puddle of broken milk and broken blood and broken everything, shaking so hard my teeth click together, and I cannot make my body move and I cannot make my mouth work and the man I was going to marry in the morning is on a bed with my sister, and my sister is smiling at me, and somewhere down the long dark hall a clock chimes midnight.

It's my wedding day.