All Chapters of THE WRONG SISTER : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Arwen didn’t answer.She looked at her sister — at the hand resting on the stomach, at the cold, clear satisfaction in her eyes, and said nothing.She walked past her.Not retreating. Just done.Isolde didn’t call after her. She didn’t need to. The words were already doing what she planned for them to do.Isolde's room was in the east wing guest suite, two doors down from Marcelline’s.Arwen walked past it that first morning and stopped for just a second outside the closed door.Then she kept walking.By the third day, the estate had reorganized itself around Isolde. Gradually, without anyone announcing that it was happening.Breakfast moved later because Isolde didn’t rise early. The housekeeper started knocking before entering rooms. Marcelline, who had spent weeks treating Arwen with the cold efficiency of someone managing a necessary inconvenience, was suddenly present again — present at meals, attentive, her voice carrying a warmth in the east wing corridor that it never carried

Nobody slept well in the estate that night. Lights were on in rooms that should have been dark. Arwen saw the line of yellow under Caelum’s office door at two in the morning when she went downstairs for water and stood in the corridor for a moment looking at it. She didn’t knock. She went back to bed and continued staring at the ceiling until six.Silas arrived before breakfast, with a leather folder. Caelum met him in the office. Arwen was called in at half past eight. She came in to find both of them standing — nobody had bothered to sit — and the folder open on the desk between them. “I need both of you here for this,” Caelum said the moment she walked in. His voice was flat and stripped of everything except function. He had dark circles under his eyes. Jacket on but collar open. He looked like a man who had spent the night dismantling a problem and was now holding the pieces. “We’re doing this once. I’m not having the same conversation in three different rooms.” “Both of us

Neither of them spoke.Silas looked at his folder, then at the door, then made the quiet professional choice to gather his papers and leave without a word to either of them.The door clicked behind him.Now it was just the two of them.“You should start thinking about what you want to take with you,” Isolde said. She was completely satisfied in the way things moved. “The rooms in the east wing are better in the morning light. I’ve always thought so.”Arwen looked at her sister for a long moment without saying anything.Then she turned and walked out.She didn’t see Caelum that night.Not at dinner — she ate alone in her room with the door closed and the tray Rowan brought going mostly untouched. Not in the corridor afterward. Not in the morning when she woke at six to the sound of the estate already moving around her, doors and footsteps and the low, urgent sound of Silas’s voice somewhere below.She got dressed, made her own coffee, and sat in the window seat with her sketchbook open

She waited till one in the morning to make the call.Three rings, then a male voice, deep and unhurried, like he was already used to taking calls like this at hours like this.“Evelyn’s contact?” she said quietly.“Depends who’s asking.”“Someone who needs a car at the service entrance of the Ravencroft estate at four fifty-five. Before the five o’clock camera cycle resets.” She paused. “Can you do that?”A short silence. “Cash?”“Yes.”“Four fifty-five,” he said. And hung up.She set the phone down on the bed and looked around the room. At the wardrobe full of dresses Simone had chosen and shoes she’d worn to events she’d attended as someone else’s wife. At the jewelry case on the dresser, still open from this morning, the Arwen Stone sitting exactly where she’d left it.She didn’t touch any of it.She started packing in the dark, with no lights — just the grey pre-dawn coming through the gap in the curtains, enough to see by if she moved slowly. She took the sketchbooks first. All f

She retired back to her room, after a while. And just laid there on the bed staring at the ceiling. The thing about being publicly discarded, was the speed of it. By lunchtime, the world had already moved on. The way the news cycle absorbed the announcement, processed it, repackaged it with a cleaner headline, and moved on to the next thing before the morning was even half finished. Arwen got up because staying in bed wasn't going to do her any good except give her more time inside her own head, and she had had enough of that.Cora was in the kitchen when she came down. She set a plate on the table without being asked, and slid Cora's phone across the surface face up. Arwen looked at it. RAVENCROFT CHOOSES TRUE HEIRESS, DITCHES DECEIVER. She looked at the headline for a long moment. Then she picked up the tea. “Thank you,” she said. Cora was sixty-something, practical. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t offer comfort. She just sat across the table and drank her own tea and let