My Husband Pretended to Be Dying for My Twin

The townhouse is too quiet.

I notice it the moment I push through the front door, my messenger bag heavy with medical journals I'll never need again. The usual hum of the air purifier Reid requires for his "condition" is absent. No low murmur of the television from the darkened bedroom where he spends his afternoons. Just silence, thick and wrong, settling over the marble foyer like dust.

I set my keys in the ceramic dish by the door—the one we picked out together on our honeymoon, back when I still believed in us—and listen.

That's when I hear it. Laughter. Light, crystalline, unmistakably female. Then the clink of wine glasses.

My stomach drops.

Reid doesn't drink. Alcohol interferes with his medication, or so he's told me for five years. And he certainly doesn't entertain—not with his tremors, his fatigue, his carefully documented list of symptoms I've memorized like scripture.

I move toward the study, my flats soundless against the hardwood. The door is cracked open, spilling warm lamplight into the hallway. Through the gap, I see him.

Reid. My husband. Standing at the bar cart with his back to me, pouring red wine into two glasses with hands that don't shake at all.

"You really had her convinced you were dying," the woman says, and my breath stops.

I know that voice. I've known it longer than any other voice in my life.

Jolene.

My twin sister steps into view, perching on the edge of Reid's desk in a way that's too familiar, too comfortable. She's wearing the Chanel jacket I complimented last Christmas, the one she said was a gift from a "friend" in Paris. Her hair—the same shade as mine but professionally highlighted—catches the light as she tilts her head back and laughs again.

"It wasn't that hard," Reid says, handing her a glass. His voice is smooth, easy, nothing like the careful monotone he uses with me. "She wanted to believe it. Genevieve's always been the martyr type."

The words hit like a fist to the sternum.

"God, remember her face when you proposed?" Jolene takes a sip, her lips staining the rim. "Like you'd handed her the moon. Meanwhile, I was packing for the Sorbonne with her scholarship letter in my suitcase."

The floor tilts beneath me. I grip the doorframe, my nails digging into painted wood.

The Sorbonne. My scholarship. The one I gave up to marry Reid, to care for him, to be the wife he needed during his "decline."

"Your masterpiece," Jolene continues, swirling her wine. "Fake neurological disorder, complete with a sympathetic neurologist on your family's payroll. I still can't believe she bought it."

"She's brilliant in a lab," Reid says, and there's something almost fond in his tone that makes my throat burn. "Just not with people. She sees what she wants to see."

"And what she wanted to see was a husband who needed her." Jolene's smile is sharp. "Pathetic, really. Five years of playing nurse to a perfectly