When Sarah Sterling heard her younger sister’s laugh drifting from behind the service door, the ballroom on the other side of the hallway was still alive with applause, crystal glasses, and silverware chiming softly against white china. Two hundred guests were waiting beneath the chandeliers of the Boston Harbor Country Club, ready for the DJ to start the video montage that would show every carefully chosen photograph of Sarah and Carter Preston’s love story. The floral arch at the front of the room still smelled of white roses and lilies.
Her wedding dress brushed against the marble floor. Her makeup was perfect. Her new husband had kissed her only minutes earlier in front of everyone she loved.
And then she heard Khloe laugh. Sarah stopped near the restroom corridor with one hand on the brass handle of the ladies’ room door. The sound had not come from the ballroom.
It had slipped through the narrow opening of a service hallway door, where a thin blade of yellow light trembled across the polished tiles. “God, she’s as naive as a child,” Khloe whispered. “Three years, Carter.
Three years, and she never figured out I was your mistress.”
The word struck Sarah so cleanly that, for one suspended second, she did not understand it as language. Her body understood first. Her fingers tightened around the small pearl clutch in her hand.
Her breath locked in her throat. The distant music became muffled, as if the entire wedding reception had been lowered underwater. Khloe laughed again, soft and smug, with a kind of triumph Sarah had never heard from her little sister before.
It was not the laugh Khloe used at family dinners or birthday brunches. It was not the laugh Sarah remembered from childhood, when Khloe would crawl into bed beside her during thunderstorms and demand that Sarah stay awake until the sky stopped shaking. This laugh belonged to a stranger.
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