I lifted the lid with fingers that didn’t feel like mine.
Inside were stacks of papers: bank statements, photographs, and a contract with Tessa’s signature.
I picked up the top photograph. Tessa was laughing in a restaurant booth, leaning toward Diane.
“That was taken eight months ago,” Jonas said.
“I don’t understand.”
Jonas spoke quietly, like a man delivering a eulogy.
“You will.” He sat down across from me. “Your sister isn’t sick, Claire.”
The room tilted. I gripped the bed.
“What did you say?”
“Your sister isn’t sick,” he repeated. “And that’s only part of the truth.”
I looked down at the box and felt the floor of my life give way.
Jonas spoke quietly, like a man delivering a eulogy.
“Tessa was never sick. The scans, the quote, all of it was staged. Diane recruited her. They met a year ago through Tessa’s old job.”
I stared at the photographs: Tessa and Diane at a coffee shop, Tessa and Diane outside a lawyer’s office, my name on a contract I had never seen.
“How long have you known?” I whispered.
“Long enough. I needed you out of that apartment before I showed you.”
I didn’t sleep. At dawn, I drove to our old place. Tessa opened the door in pajamas, her face falling when she saw me.
“Claire, I can explain.”
“Was any of it real?”
“Diane said we could finally be free.”
She started crying. Not the soft tears I knew. Loud, ugly ones.
“You don’t understand what it’s like. Watching you work yourself to nothing. Diane said we could finally be free.”
“Free of what, Tessa? Of me?”
“Of being poor. You would have done the same.”
“No,” I said. “I wouldn’t have.”
I signed the annulment petition.
I drove straight to my fake husband’s lawyer that afternoon. The contract, he explained, was a side agreement Tessa had forged in my name, promising Diane half of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar infidelity payout buried in clause nine of the prenup. The payout would trigger automatically if Jonas was found unfaithful during the marriage. Diane had been collecting evidence to plant from the moment she realized I could be used.
I signed the annulment petition. I refused the settlement Jonas offered, then the smaller one, then the envelope he tried to press into my hand at the door.
“You earned something,” Jonas said.
