All Chapters of My Sister’s Substitute : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Neo knew on Sunday morning.It wasn’t something he acknowledged vocally. Nothing over breakfast. No pressing. No fishing. He just – knew. She could feel his quiet attention on her, like that second skin of peripheral awareness he was always projecting outward. It was finely calibrated, tuned to the smallest fluctuations of her frequency, and he didn’t make any big production about her having a slight twitch in it today.She was trying to be normal.Normal was a very big challenge today.She was sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, eating her scrambled eggs and discussing the aftermath of the PR stuff with all the right levels of concern and interaction, laughing at all the right places when he made a dry joke about Claudette charging for emotional labor, and felt him watching her from his stool on the other side of the island, like a man who had finished one file and was simply waiting for the appropriate time to retrieve the next.After breakfast he suggested they go for a walk.

She didn't sleep.Not restless, toss-turn sleep with your body fighting it. The other kind. Where you were completely still so that someone else would assume you were sleeping, your arms crossed on your chest, your face tilted towards the ceiling, not sleepy, just nowhere.Numb. That was the word.Not sadness, exactly. Not anger, exactly. Just-emptied out. It felt like something that had lived in her for years had quietly packed its bags and moved out, leaving only an indentation where it had been, a strange shape you could still see but that you couldn't feel yet because you needed to feel it to register the pain, and she didn't feel much of anything right now.She thought of Allison's cream jacket. The side gate.How casual it was.Someone who'd used that exit before.Fourteen years. Middle school in Atlanta, two immigrant Ukrainian girls recognizing each other in a loud American hallway and deciding, implicitly and instantaneously, that they were going to be fine, as long as they w

She didn't apologize that day. Or the next. Sasha had not expected it; Margaret McKinney was not a woman that operated in anyone else's timeline, her own son's included. And so she went about her days not waiting for the apology, which was the only sane way to conduct oneself through that particular scenario.Because it was subtler than an apology anyway. The invitation to the sitting room ceased, the pretense of surgery ended, replaced by a kind of quiet that was somehow even better than an outright admission. Margaret still occupied the house fully Margaret-McKinney; the pearls, the posture, the specific authority that went along with sixteen years of managing a household that one had not completely relinquished. The difference was the singling out of Irina – the pointed suggestions, the delicately layered comments with their obvious implications. It stopped.Irina realized it Saturday morning over breakfast. Margaret was at the table already. Good morning, she had said. And returne

She drove to Zachary’s apartment on Tuesday night.No prior call, no text, nothing. She’d tried those before and received blue ticks, voicemails, the cowardly signature of a man who knows something is coming and wants, more than anything, for it to come differently.It was not coming differently.She parked in front of the building this time. Not down the street, not angled away so that she was unseen while visible. Directly in front, in the spot closest to the building's entrance, with a deliberateness that declared she had made up her mind, that this was going to happen.She buzzed his apartment number.A long pause. Then his voice, cool and wary, over the intercom, already knowing: "Irina." "Let me up Zach."Another pause.The lock clicked.--- He was waiting at the apartment door when she stepped out of the elevator. Still in his work clothes, gym bag standing ready by the door like he'd just gotten in, or had staged it to look that way. He saw her face and whatever he saw in it

The lamp threw warm gold across the library and outside Atlanta was doing that in-between thing — the dark not quite dark anymore, the light not yet committed. That hour that belonged to nobody and therefore belonged entirely to whoever was awake in it.They were still on the sofa. Still close.She didn't know who moved first. Didn't think it mattered. The space between them had been making its own decisions for weeks and they'd both just been politely pretending otherwise.His hand found hers first. That was where it started. Not dramatic, not announced — just his fingers closing over hers where they rested on the sofa between them. Warm. Deliberate. Like a question he already knew the answer to but was asking anyway because she deserved to be asked.She turned her hand over and laced her fingers through his.He exhaled slowly. Like he'd been holding something for a long time and had finally put it down. She knew exactly how that felt.He reached up with his free hand and pushed a l