THEY CHOOSE THE FAKE, NOW I OWN EVERYTHING

Dying hurts less than being forgotten.

I learned that at the bottom of a cliff, with my sister's perfume still clinging to my collar and my parents' names dying in my throat. I had screamed for them the entire way down. Nobody came.

So when a woman shrieked, "Somebody call a doctor!" I didn't flinch.

I stood perfectly still, a bowl of chocolate mousse trembling in my hands, and listened to my own heartbeat. It was loud. It was alive. It shouldn't have been.

"Lydia! Lydia, baby, look at me!"

My mother knelt beside the dining chair, cradling my sister like something priceless. Miriam Halvorsen was making a sound I had begged seventeen years to hear aimed at me. A terrified, tender sound. A mother's sound.

Lydia coughed, one slender hand pressed to her throat, her eyes swimming with tears. "It's... shrimp," she whispered. "Mommy, I can't breathe..."

"She's allergic to shellfish!" someone gasped.

"Who gave it to her?"

Every head in the ballroom turned toward me.

I almost laughed. I knew this scene by heart. In my last life, I had dropped the bowl and sobbed that I knew nothing about it. I had said I didn't do it so many times that the words stopped sounding like words. No one had listened. They never did.

And a few months later, on the edge of a cliff, my sister had leaned close to my ear and whispered in her softest voice, You were never supposed to come back, Tessa.

Then she let go.

This time, I set the bowl down on the nearest table. Gently. Carefully. Like it meant nothing.

"Tessa."

My father's voice cut through the room, low and cold. Gregory Halvorsen never shouted when he was angry. He went quiet, and the quiet was worse.

"What did you put in that bowl?"

"Chocolate mousse," I said. "The one Lydia asked me to bring her."

A ripple of whispers ran through the guests. I caught pieces of it. Raised in the countryside... no manners... poor Lydia...

Lydia's lashes fluttered.

Cry, you stupid country girl. Cry like last time.

I went still.

The voice was sweet and clear and unmistakably my sister's. But her lips hadn't moved. She was still gasping, still trembling, still the picture of a girl poisoned by her own sister.

Come on. Beg. Beg so they hate you even more.

My fingers curled into the folds of my dress. I wasn't imagining it. I could hear her. I could hear every poisonous thought behind that fragile face.

And suddenly I understood why my head felt so strange. In my last life, whenever Lydia looked at me, a cold fog slid over my mind. My own memories turned slippery. I would stand there thinking, Maybe I did do it. Maybe I really am as bad as they say. I had never known it was her.

Now my thoughts were clear. Sharp as broken glass.

Lydia's eyes found mine across the room. A tiny crease appeared between her brows, as if she had reached for a door and found only a wall.

Why can't I...

The thought snapped off like a cut thread. She covered it with a sob.

"Daddy, please don't be angry with her," Lydia whispered, trembling. "Maybe she didn't mean it. Maybe she just isn't used to us yet."

There. Now they'll hate her even more for making me be kind.

A few guests sighed at how generous she was. My mother pressed Lydia's face into her shoulder and glared at me like I was something dirty on her shoe.

She hadn't looked at me once. Not to ask if I was all right. Not even to ask whether I was the one who was frightened.

"Tessa, apologize to your sister," my father said.

"For what?"

"Don't you dare." His jaw tightened. "Don't you dare play innocent in front of our guests."

"I asked what I'm apologizing for. I brought her what she requested. I didn't cook it. I didn't season it. Ask the kitchen who made it."

"Then how did shrimp get in it?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe ask the person who's coughing so beautifully."

A collective gasp. My mother's head snapped up.

"How can you say that?" Her voice cracked. "Look at her! Your own sister can barely breathe, and you're making jokes? Why do you hate her so much? What has Lydia ever done to you?"

What has she ever done to me?

The question landed deep in my chest, in a place I thought I had buried.

I wanted to tell her. I wanted to say: She took my room. She took my name. She took the lullaby you used to hum, the one I only heard once on the phone when I was nine, when you thought I had fallen asleep.

I wanted to say: I wrote you letters for seventeen years, Mother. Did you read even one?

Instead, I swallowed it all. I had learned the hard way that my tears only fed Lydia.

My gaze drifted across the ballroom. My younger brother Callum stood at the back with his hands in his pockets, jaw clenched. He met my eyes for half a second and looked away, exactly like last time. The maid, Dolores, hovered beside the dessert table, twisting her apron, her face the color of paper. She knew something. She had always known something.

And on a small table draped in black at the far end of the room sat a framed photograph of an old man with kind eyes.

Grandpa Walter.

The only person who had ever answered my letters. He had been buried last winter, and no one had asked whether I wanted to come to the funeral.

My fingers found the jade pendant hidden beneath my collar, the one he had pressed into my palm the last time I saw him. Be patient, little river, he'd whispered. Eighteen. Just reach eighteen.

I was eighteen tonight.

Why hadn't I remembered that before?

"Enough." My father's voice shook the room. "Get on your knees, Tessa. Apologize to your sister in front of everyone, or you are no daughter of mine."

The ballroom went silent.

I looked at him. Really looked. At the man who had never once called me by name when I was small. At the man whose approval I had chased through two lifetimes.

Then I heard Lydia's thought, bright and eager.

Hit her. Hit her, Daddy. Make her look like the monster.

His hand rose.

And in that instant, the world blinked. A flash, sharp and white: his palm slashing toward my cheek, my mother holding Lydia and not me, and a tall man in a black suit pushing open the ballroom doors, a leather folder in his hand stamped with my grandfather's seal.

The vision vanished as fast as it had come, leaving my head ringing.

I didn't close my eyes. For the first time in two lifetimes, I didn't flinch.

Behind my father, the double doors began to open.