When I stepped out of the taxi in front of my apartment building in Portland, Oregon, I was exhausted from months of fieldwork in Nevada. All I wanted was a shower, my own bed, and a quiet evening with my fiancé, Ethan Hayes—if he managed to get home early from his conference in Boston. Instead, my return began with shouting.
My sister, Madison Reed, stood on the porch in a sparkly white cocktail dress that looked wildly out of place under the gray Oregon sky.
Next to her was a man I had never seen before, wearing an ill-fitting navy suit and an expression that suggested he was seconds away from bolting. “Lena!” Madison shouted, lifting her chin in triumph.
“I married your rich fiancé! Don’t cry!”
My suitcase handle nearly slipped from my fingers.
I stared at her, at the man, at the bizarre tableau—my brain scrambling to make sense of it.
My heartbeat thudded so loudly it drowned out the traffic behind me. “You… what?” I whispered, but the sidewalk tilted beneath me before I heard her answer. I fainted.
Hours later, I woke up on my couch with a blanket over me and a headache pounding behind my eyes.
As soon as memory rushed back—the dress, the stranger, the ridiculous announcement—I burst into laughter. Real, uncontrollable laughter.
Because the man Madison married was not Ethan. Not even close.
Ethan Hayes was six states away, probably obsessing over market reports and drinking terrible hotel coffee.
The man on my porch had been… well, a stranger. A prop. Someone my sister had pulled into whatever delusional scheme she had constructed while I was away.
Relief washed over me so intensely I almost felt lightheaded again.
Madison had always been competitive—envy practically encoded into her DNA—but this was new even for her. She had tried to “steal” something that wasn’t even hers to steal.
But underneath the absurdity, a question gnawed at me: Why did she do it? Who was that man?
And what lies had she told him?
The next morning, when I walked into the kitchen, Madison sat at the breakfast bar sipping orange juice like she owned the place. The stranger—apparently her groom—sat beside her, looking like he regretted every decision of the past 48 hours. “Morning, sis,” Madison said.
“I see you survived your dramatic little episode.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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