One night, after Carissa came back from a gallery opening Jackson had invited her to, she found Nikki in the house.
Not visiting. Installed.
Shoes off by the door. Wineglass in hand. Curled into the corner of the couch while Damen sat too close beside her with the remote, both of them looking up at Carissa like they had spent the evening deciding how much of the truth they could force her to witness before she broke.
“What is she doing here?” Carissa asked.
Nikki crossed one leg over the other. “Spending time with someone who isn’t ashamed of wanting me around.”
Carissa looked at Damen. “You let her in.”
“This is my house too,” he said.
“No,” Carissa replied. “It’s the house you live in because I bought it.”
His face darkened.
Nikki laughed softly, but there was tension in it. Even she knew property records were less emotional than whatever story she had been telling herself about destiny.
“Get out,” Carissa said.
Nikki set the glass down. “You don’t get to talk to me like some random woman.”
Carissa held her gaze. “Random women generally have more dignity.”
Damen stood then, moving half a step in front of Nikki like a man protecting the person he wanted from the one who had funded him.
“Don’t do this.”
Carissa’s voice sharpened. “How long?”
Neither answered.
She looked at Nikki. “How long?”
Nikki stared back with her chin high, the tears absent this time, stripped away because maybe she was too tired or maybe she had finally decided that shame was harder than cruelty.
“Since spring,” Nikki said.
Damen snapped, “Nikki—”
She turned on him. “What? She already knows.”
Carissa felt something inside her go completely still.
Since spring.
It was November.
Seven months.
Seven months of borrowed rent and stolen weekends and conversations that must have happened in the spaces around her life while she was working late or traveling for hearings or sitting across from her husband at dinner believing boredom was the worst thing in the room.
“You slept with him while I was paying your electric bill,” Carissa said.
Nikki’s face tightened. “You always say things like that, like help comes without strings.”
“It came with exactly one string,” Carissa said. “Don’t betray me.”
“That is so self-righteous.”
Damen stepped in. “Can we stop making this all about money?”
Carissa turned to him slowly. “That is easy for the only two people in this room who never paid any.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then Nikki said the thing Carissa would remember for years, not because it was the cruelest sentence spoken that night, but because it was the most revealing.
“He chose me,” Nikki said. “You can throw numbers around all you want. At the end of the day, he chose me.”
Carissa looked at her little sister and finally understood something she should have understood sooner. Nikki had not merely taken what was available. She had wanted the win.
Not the man.
The win.
The proof that even now, even with Carissa’s career and house and stability and discipline, she could still step into the center of any room and walk out with the thing Carissa loved.
That knowledge hurt, but it also clarified.
Carissa took out her phone, opened the photo of the deed Denise had sent earlier that week, and held it up.
“You both have until Monday to figure out how humiliating you want the next steps to be,” she said. “Because if either of you is still in this house after that, I begin the formal process.”
Damen laughed, but there was fear in it now. “You’d really do that.”
Carissa met his eyes. “I am beginning to suspect you don’t know me at all.”
On Sunday morning, their mother called.
Of course she did.
Linda Hale still lived in the same split-level house in Naperville where both girls had grown up, though Tom Hale had died four years earlier after a second stroke and the place had felt half-empty ever since. Carissa almost didn’t answer. Then she saw the time—8:12 a.m.—and knew this was not a social call. Linda only called that early when she wanted to manage reality before it hardened.
“Your sister is beside herself,” Linda said without greeting.
Carissa poured coffee and held the phone between shoulder and ear. “Good morning to you too.”
“Don’t be sarcastic. She says you cut off her money overnight.”
“Yes.”
Linda exhaled sharply. “Carissa.”
There it was. Her name in that tone. The tone reserved for moments when Carissa had again failed to be infinitely absorbent.
“She says she and Damen are in love.”
Carissa smiled at the kitchen wall. “Did she say that before or after she admitted she’s been sleeping with my husband for seven months?”
Linda fell silent for a fraction too long.
So Nikki had not led with that.
Interesting.
“She said the marriage was already in trouble,” Linda said.
“Then she should have the courage to date after the divorce, not during it.”
“Things are not always that simple.”
“They are exactly that simple.”
Linda shifted tactics. “You know Nikki has always been fragile.”
Carissa closed her eyes.
There are sentences that can age thirty years in a second.
