Chapter 13: "The Confession"

Kade never finished the sentence. Killian's arrival had swallowed whatever he was about to confess, and by the time his brother finally left with a strained excuse about a forgotten meeting, the moment had closed over like it had never existed at all.

I asked him again on the way out, standing on the sidewalk outside the darkened bookstore while Killian idled by his car a polite, deliberate distance away, close enough to watch, far enough to pretend he wasn't. Kade only shook his head, jaw tight, and told me it would keep.

"That's not fair," I said. "You can't start something like that and just walk away from it."

"I know." He looked genuinely pained by it, more than the situation seemed to warrant for a man who had, as far as I knew, done nothing wrong. "Trust me, Mia. When I tell you, I want it to just be us. No audience. No interruptions."

It did not keep well in my head.

Two weeks passed in a blur of scheduled dinners and quiet lunches, of Killian's extravagant gestures and Kade's careful, deliberate ones, until the city itself seemed to have an opinion about which twin I preferred. A gossip blog ran a poll. An actual poll, with my name in the headline and a photograph of me from three different angles like I was a runway show instead of a person.

Team Kade or Team Killian: Which Carter Wins Mia Perez's Heart?

Team Kade was winning by four percentage points when I finally closed the tab and threw my phone face down onto the couch cushion beside me.

Clover had taken to reading the comments aloud at lunch, half laughing, half something else I couldn't quite place at the time. "People are calling you the Carter Curse," she said one afternoon, stabbing at her salad without much interest in eating it. "Apparently you're cursed to be fought over for the rest of your natural life."

"Lucky me."

"I'd take it," she said quietly, almost too quiet for me to catch over the cafeteria noise. "Being fought over. Any day."

I hadn't thought much of it then. I had my own mess to drown in.

Work had become a strange, split existence. Half my day belonged to litigation briefs and shareholder calls, the ordinary rhythm of a job I actually loved, and the other half belonged to navigating a hallway that had turned into an obstacle course of hopeful interns, nosy paralegals, and at least one enterprising junior associate who had started a betting pool of his own, entirely separate from Clover's, on which twin would propose first. I fielded three separate requests for comment from actual journalists, which I ignored, and one request from my own mother, which I could not.

Mom: Sweetheart, is it true you're dating BOTH Carter twins? Your aunt Rosalind saw it on the internet. Call me.

I did not call her. Some conversations were better had after several more glasses of wine and possibly a lawyer of my own.

Gifts arrived at my office nearly every day, a rotation of the two men's very different approaches to affection. Killian sent extravagant things, a bracelet one day, a first edition of a novel I'd mentioned once in passing the next, each package wrapped like he needed the whole building to know it had come from him. Kade sent smaller things, quieter things, a coffee exactly the way I liked it left on my desk with no note attached, because he already knew I would recognize his handwriting on the cup.

None of it was the thing keeping me up at night, though. What kept me up was smaller and heavier than any headline. It was the memory of Killian's mouth against mine in a hotel room I'd walked into believing it was his brother's, and the fact that Kade still didn't know.

I had let it sit for weeks now, telling myself it wasn't relevant, that it happened before any of this began, that it changed nothing. But every time Kade looked at me with that quiet, searching patience of his, guilt curled tighter around my ribs until it was hard to breathe through dinner.

He deserved to hear it from me. Not from Killian in a moment of spite. Not from a blog with too much time and too many cameras.

I rehearsed it a dozen different ways in my head over the following days. In the shower, in the elevator, in the middle of a client meeting when I was supposed to be reviewing a settlement agreement and instead found myself drafting confessions in the margins of my legal pad. Every version sounded worse than the last. There was no elegant way to tell a man you had slept with his identical twin brother before you'd even properly met him, no phrasing clever enough to soften a truth that ugly.

Clover noticed my distraction over lunch one day, poking at my untouched salad with her fork. "You've been somewhere else for a week. What's going on?"

"Nothing," I lied. "Just tired."

"Tired," she repeated, unconvinced, though she let it go, the way she'd been letting a lot of things go too, apparently, in both directions.

I called him on a Tuesday, my hands shaking hard enough that I had to set the phone down on the counter and put him on speaker just to keep my voice steady.

"Can you come over?" I asked. "There's something I need to tell you."

There was a pause on the other end, brief but noticeable. "Is everything all right?"

"I don't know yet. It depends on how you take it."

He arrived in twenty minutes, faster than should have been possible from across the city, still in his work clothes with his tie loosened at the collar, like he'd left the office at a run the moment he hung up the phone. I spent those twenty minutes pacing my living room in tight, useless circles, rehearsing the words one final time, and none of it helped in the slightest once I actually heard his knock at the door.

He read the look on my face the second I opened the door and didn't bother with a greeting.

"Just say it, Mia."

I led him to the couch, sat down across from him instead of beside him, needing the distance for whatever was about to happen. My throat felt like it had closed halfway shut.

"That first night," I started, then stopped, started again. "The night I thought I finally found you. It wasn't you."

His expression didn't change, not yet, patient in the way it always was.

"I know that part," he said carefully. "Killian told me you'd figured it out. That you left before morning."

"He didn't tell you everything."

Something shifted behind his gray eyes, a slow, dawning stillness settling over his whole body.

"What didn't he tell me?"

I made myself hold his gaze even though every part of me wanted to look away.

"I slept with him, Kade. Before I knew who he was. I thought he was you."