All Chapters of THE WRONG SISTER : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

79 Chapters

Chapter 61: The First Dawn

She woke up the next day and the first thing she did was throwing up.She had simply sat up too fast, and felt the room tilt, but she made it to the bathroom in time. She knelt on the cold tile floor for a minute afterward with her forehead against the wall and her hair in her face.Well... Okay... So this is happening, she thought.She sat there until her legs stopped shaking. Then she stood up, rinsed her mouth, looked at herself in the mirror.She looked terrible. Her hair was unwashed, the skin under her eyes were dark, and she was still in the same clothes from yesterday.She had been surviving on tea and bad sleep and was only now beginning to understand the full size of what she’d walked into.“Right,” she said to the mirror.Nobody answered. Which was, she was realising, going to be the new normal.-----Cora was already out when she came downstairs. There was a note on the kitchen table.There's bread in the cupboard, milk’s fresh, and a key on top of the note.Arwen stood

Chapter 62: The Small Victory

She ended the call, and just stood there in front of the mirror staring at herself for a long time.Afterwards, she couldn't move her feet freely. They hurt in a way she never expected.She made it to the bathtub at nine forty-five at night and just sat at the edge and held her own feet for a minute.This was her life now.Okay.-----She got a job three days after she became Wren Archer.The café was called Grounds.It was small, slightly battered around the edges, the kind of place that had mismatched chairs on purpose and local art on the walls that was actually for sale and a chalkboard menu that someone rewrote every morning in handwriting that got progressively worse toward the bottom. It was run by a woman. She was thirty-eight and always looked exhausted. She hired Arwen — Wren... in about eight minutes flat.“You have café experience?” The woman asked, looking at her across the counter.“Some,” Wren said, which was a lie. She had watched baristas make her coffee for five mon

Chapter 63: The First Thread

She almost didn’t do it.She spent two days talking herself out of it, telling herself it wasn’t her problem. She had enough problems, she was broke, living in a room with a knocking radiator, and probably pregnant. So the last thing she needed was to start pulling at threads connected to Viktor Ashbourne.On the third day, she decided to write down a note.It took four drafts.The first one was too long. She explained the whole clause, the case precedent, the exact filing process, and by the end it read like a legal brief and not like something a normal person would slip under a door.She scrapped it.The second one was too vague. Look into community asset protection under the Local Infrastructure Act. She read it back and thought, that tells them nothing, they’ll google it and get to nowhere and give up.She scrapped it too.Third draft she tried to find the middle and ended up somewhere awkward, half legal half friendly, and it sounded like she was pretending to be someone she wa

Chapter 64: The Web Begins

She couldn’t stop noticing things.That was the problem.She’d walk into a shop and see a supplier contract pinned behind the till and immediately spot where the owner was being cheated.She’d overhear someone arguing on the phone with their bank and already know three ways they could push back.She couldn’t turn it off — all that knowledge she’d picked up inside the Ravencroft estate, sitting in meetings nobody thought to exclude her from, reading documents nobody thought she was paying attention to.It just kept showing up. Everywhere she went.So she stopped fighting it and started using it.-----It started with the print shop on Colvin Street.It was run by a father and son. The kind of place that did wedding invitations and business cards and smelled permanently of ink.It looked like it had been there long enough that the sign outside was slightly faded. She went in to print something for Cora and ended up waiting twenty minutes because the son was on the phone

Chapter 65: The Body’s Betrayal

She made it through the four o’clock shift.Barely.She was fine until about seven, when the smell of the milk steamer hit her wrong and she had to put the cup down, walk to the back, and stand over the sink for a full minute, trying to talk herself out of being sick.She managed it and came back out. Because she had to finish the order.She handed it to the customer, smiling.It happened again at eight-fifteen with someone’s reheated sandwich.By nine she was running on nothing but water and whatever biscuits Cora had left in her coat pocket that morning.Her feet and back hurt and she felt like her body was quietly staging a protest she hadn’t agreed to.She told herself it was the long shifts.She told herself that on Tuesday when she threw up before work. And Wednesday when it happened again. And Thursday when it happened twice and she had to sit on the bathroom floor for ten minutes before she could stand up properly.Then she missed her second period.And she stopped lying to

Chapter 66: The Fortress of Solitude

The baby needed a room.That was the thought she woke up with at five in the morning, three days after the test.She had only a café job that paid just enough to cover rent and crackers.She needed something more. For proper food, prenatal vitamins, and some baby things she had to save for.She lay there in the dark doing the numbers.They didn’t work.She got up.Cora was already in the kitchen when she came downstairs at half past five with her sketchbook and her laptop — the old one, battered, that she’d bought secondhand the first week with cash because she’d needed something and couldn’t use anything connected to her old accounts.Cora looked at her, looked at the laptop, then at the time on the kitchen clock.“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll make eggs.”“You don’t have to...”“I know I don’t have to.” She was already at the stove. “Just sit.”Wren sat, opened the laptop, and pulled up the freelance design platform she’d created an account on two days ago under the Wren Archer name.“

Chapter 67: Caelum’s Spiral - The Emptiness

Back at the estate, everywhere was too quiet.Caelum had spent years wanting less noise in this house — fewer people, fewer obligations, fewer conversations that went nowhere. Now he had all of it and he couldn’t stand to be in any room for longer than ten minutes.He moved from the office to the study to the dining room and back again like something was chasing him.Nothing was chasing him.*He snapped at the housekeeper on Monday morning because the coffee was wrong.Not wrong exactly. Just… not how he wanted it. He couldn’t explain how he wanted it because he’d never had to explain it before. It had just always been right.“I’ll remake it, sir…”“Don’t bother.”He left the cup on the counter and went to his office.He stood at the window for twenty minutes staring at nothing in particular.-----Silas came by on Tuesday.He sat across from the desk with a folder.“The Calloway filing came through,” he said. “Protected status confirmed.”“Good.”“The regulatory referral on Ashbour

Chapter 68: Caelum’s Spiral - The Hunt

Three days later, Caelum found Rowan in the corridor outside the east wing and stopped him right there.He kept his voice low enough that nobody passing would catch it.“I want you to find her,” he said.Rowan looked at him. “Sir…”“I’m not asking you to bring her back. I’m not asking you to make contact.” He kept his eyes level. “I want to know she’s not starving in a gutter somewhere. That’s all.”Rowan was quiet for a moment. “And if she is?”“Then I want to know that too.”“And then what?”Caelum looked at him. “Find her first. Then we’ll see. Do not question me further.”Rowan nodded once. “I’ll need a few days.”“You only have two.”He went back to the office and sat at his desk with the necklace still on the surface where he’d left it three days ago.He went through the Verdant acquisition documents and the Ashbourne regulatory referral and four other things that needed his attention and had been waiting for over a week.He got through two pages of the first document before he

Chapter 69: The Insider

The bakery owner introduced Arwen to his brother.She’d pictured someone loud. Someone with the same energy as his brother.This one was the opposite.Quiet, late twenties. He sat at the end of the counter on a Tuesday evening nursing a black coffee like it had personally offended him and said almost nothing for the first twenty minutes he was there.She only knew who he was because the bakery owner had come in earlier that day and said, “My brother’s stopping by tonight. He works at…” He’d paused. “Actually can he just talk to you? He’s having a thing and I don’t know what to tell him and you seem like a better person to help.”“What kind of thing?”“A work thing.” He’d shrugged. “Just talk to him.”The evening crowd thinned out around eight.She wiped down the counter and refilled his coffee without being asked.Then, he looked up.“My brother says you help people,” he said.“I make coffee.” She raised an eyebrow.“He says you helped him with a contract thing. And the co-op on Renne

Chapter 70: The Mother’s Resolve

She felt a small, fluttery movement on a Wednesday morning behind the counter.It was gone in two seconds.She put her hand flat on her apron.Her co-worker looked at her. “You okay?”“Fine.” She picked up the next order. “Go check the milk.”He left.She stood at the machine and waited to feel it again.Nothing.She made the coffee, set it on the counter, and called the next order.But her hand kept drifting back to her stomach between cups.-----Wren mentioned casually, without details, that she needed medical care and couldn’t use the regular system right now. The co-op owner looked at her for a long moment and then said, “I know someone. She’s retired from the NHS but she still does private care. She's very quiet and doesn’t ask questions she doesn’t need answers to.”“Is she good?”“She delivered my youngest in my kitchen at two in the morning because the hospital was forty minutes away.” She paused. “She’s that good.”The midwife lived twenty minutes from Cora’s old place, in a

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