THE MORNING AFTER

Rosaline's POV

I refused to believe it.

I stood there stunned, the phone still pressed against my ear. Donald’s voice was still going on, talking about some emergency in Singapore he had to take care of.

I wasn't hearing any of it.

All my brain could process was that he was never there last night. That I had waited so long just to give myself to somebody else.

"Rosaline? You've gone quiet on me."

I blinked out of my head. "I'm here," I said. My voice came out weak. "I'm just tired."

"Of course you are." He sounded genuinely sorry and that made everything even worse. "I'm so sorry about last night. You know what? When I'm back we’ll go for a real honeymoon. Wherever you want. Just name it"

"Okay."

"I love you, baby."

"I love you too."

I hung up.

Then I stood with the phone in my hand for a while, trying to come to terms with everything that had happened.

After that was a calm that frightened even me. It was like I was panicking on the inside but none of the storm that was raging inside me showed on the surface. All I wanted to do at that point was just to figure out how Donald was here last night and at the same time, wasn't here.

I set the phone down carefully. I walked back to the bedroom. I looked at the bed, memories of the past night now disturbing me more than anything, and I started searching.

I don’t even know exactly what I was looking for. Maybe some reason to prove that I wasn't at fault. I searched through everything, desperately looking for something I could use to vindicate myself. The bathroom, the sitting area, there was no sign of anyone even being there.

There were no men's clothes anywhere.

No watch on the nightstand. No shoes by the door. Nothing that belonged to Donald because Donald was never there.

I was about to give up and convince myself I had lost my mind when my foot hit something half hidden under the bed.

I crouched down and picked it up.

A cufflink.

It was a small, silver, expensive looking one that you could only find in luxury stores. I inspected the accessory with shaking hands and found a calligraphed initial at the back.

W.M.

Not D.M.

W.M.

Wesley Mendez.

My phone fell off my hands as I pieced everything together. I staggered backwards as the entire room seemed to tilt. My hands clasped my face as entire scenarios from last night started to replay in my head. The touches, kisses, all the little changes I totally ignored because I was too ‘into the moment’.

They were identical. Same face. Same height. Same voice.

I hadn't known.

God help me, I hadn't known.

I picked up my phone to call the only person I could think to call at that point; Crystal. I searched for her number with fingers that wouldn’t stop trembling.

"It wasn't Donald," I said without greeting.

A pause. "What?"

"Last night. It wasn't Donald." The words sounded totally insane coming out of my mouth. "Donald was at the airport the whole night. He left at nine. Crystal…" my voice broke on her name. "It was Wesley."

There was a dead silence.

"Rosaline, are you sure?"

I looked at the cufflink still in my hand. "That’s what it looks like. I found his cufflinks. It had W.M engraved on it. What have I done, Crystal?"

She exhaled sharply. "Oh my God."

"I slept with Wesley on my wedding night. I slept with my brother-in-law on my wedding night, Crystal." Saying it out loud sounded like those ridiculous scenes in those movies that Crystal forces me to watch. It sounded dumb and I couldn’t even believe I was the one saying those words.

How could this be happening?

"Okay," Crystal said. Her voice shifted into the serious tone she uses on rare occasions. "Okay, listen to me. Do not do anything. Don't call anyone. Don't go anywhere. I'm coming to you right now."

"I need to talk to him. I need to talk to Wesley…"

"Not like this. Not when you're this upset. You'll say something you can't take back and make everything worse. Wait for me."

She was right. If I acted impulsively, everything would blow completely out of proportion..

I told myself I would wait.

But I did the exact opposite.

Twenty minutes later I was in my car. I hadn't even watched off the make-up on my face from last night. A wave of confusion crashed inside me and my jaws clenched so hard that it felt like my teeth cracked.

The estate was twenty minutes from the hotel but with the way I was speeding, I made it in thirteen.

I knocked on Wesley’s door so hard that I almost bruised my knuckles. After a few minutes, the door creaked open and I saw Donald’s face. The resemblance was uncanny. Everything was identical. The beard, the color of his eyes, even the dimples that appeared on his cheek whenever he smiled. Everything was similar to a fault.

But the thing that really broke something open in me wasn't his face.

It was his expression.

He didn't look surprised.

Not even a little bit.

He studied me with his eyes, noticing everything from my ruffled hair and the mascara still on my face, totally unfazed like he knew that he had been expecting me to come.

"You knew I'd come," I said.

He stepped aside to let me in without a word.

I walked in and spun around to face him, the cufflink balled in my fist. My chest was heaving up and down like I had just run a marathon.

"Please tell me I'm wrong," I said. My voice was shaking but I held his gaze. "Please tell me it wasn't you and I will walk out of here and never speak of this again."

Wesley looked at me for a long, quiet moment.

"Rosaline, I can’t tell you that," he said.

THE TWIN

Rosaline's POV

The silence that followed what he said felt like screamings in my ears.

We both stared at each other and for a moment I genuinely could not speak. I had thoughts of a lot of things I wanted to say on the drive to his place but everything had abandoned me.

Then, like a tidal wave, it all came rushing back at once.

"Why?" My voice cracked, my throat burning with painful heat. "Why would you do that to me? To your own brother?"

Wesley moved to the window. He stood with his back to me for a moment, looking out of the window like he was trying to carefully select the next words he was going to say. He finally stared at me and with such calm that I wanted to throw something at his face.

"I've been in love with you for three years, Rosaline."

I blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

"Since the engagement party. The first night Donald brought you home." He said it so plainly.

I laughed. Not because anything was funny. I guess the only reaction I could let off was a hollow laugh that only came out when something unbelievable happens.

"You've been in love with me," I repeated slowly. "So you decided that the best thing to do was climb into my bed on my wedding night and…" I couldn't even finish the sentence. "You call that love? That's not love, Wesley. That's not even close to love. This is something else entirely."

"I know." He looked pained about it, and somehow this only made me angrier. "I know it was wrong."

"Wrong." I took a step toward him. "I was a virgin. Did you know that? Did Donald tell you that?"

My voice was rising and I didn't try to stop it. "I saved myself. Twenty-eight years I waited and I gave that to you thinking you were my husband. You took something from me that you had absolutely no right to touch and you're standing there telling me it was wrong like you accidentally stepped on my foot."

His face changed into something genuine. Shame? Regret? I couldn't tell exactly.

"Rosaline…"

"Don't." I held up a hand. "Don't say my name like that."

I opened my fist and threw the cufflink at his chest.

"You're going to keep your mouth shut. You are never going to tell Donald what happened. Not ever. As far as anyone in this family is concerned, last night did not happen. Do you understand me?"

He looked at the cufflink at the floor and then at me.

"And if I don't agree to that?"

“Then I will do everything in my power to ruin you. I’ll tell Donald and everyone else what you did today and show them what kind of man you are. Is that really what you want?”

A long pause.

"No," he said finally.

"Good. Stay away from me."

I walked out of the house feeling like I couldn’t breathe.

I was on autopilot throughout the entire drive back home.

***

Donald came home two days later, totally clueless about what had happened. He came back with a bouquet of flowers and an expensive pendant he had especially picked out for me and this made my chest hurt even more. He held me like he had missed me and kissed my forehead and called me his wife and I smiled back at every single thing he said, that made me feel dirty and shameful.

I had done nothing wrong.

I knew that.

But try telling that to the guilt weighing on my chest.

I tried acting totally normal. I cooked for him, laughed at his stories about Singapore. But sitting across from him at the dining table, looking at his face, a face that looked identical to his twin brother that had taken advantage of me, I felt an emotion I couldn’t quite put a tag on.

I was so busy being normal that I almost didn't hear the phone ring.

Donald reached for it first, glanced at the screen and stood up from the table. His expression shifted.

"I need to take this," he said. "Work."

He stepped out of the dining room.

I sat with my fork halfway to my mouth and told myself it was nothing.

Except it kept happening.

Calls that he had to move away to take. Late nights that extended to early mornings. Whenever he was with me he still acted the same. He still called me baby and held my hands in public.

But something was different.

I didn't have the emotional space to dig into it. Not with everything I was already carrying.

Then three weeks after Donald came home, my phone rang at eleven in the morning. I was sitting in the living area, doing nothing in particular when a call from my mother came in.

Except it wasn't my mother calling.

It was her housekeeper, Maria. Her voice sounded wrong before she even said anything.

"Miss Rosaline," she said. "You need to come. Something has happened."

"What?" I sat up, my voice turning anxious . "Maria, what happened? Where is my mother?"

"Please just come," she whispered. "And call your husband."

Twenty minutes later I pulled up to my parents' house to find two police cars parked outside and my father sitting on the front steps with his face buried in his hands. Panic shot through my body and I froze for a minute, my mind going through the worst possible scenarios.

I ran to him. "Dad. Dad, where is Mom? Where is she?"

He looked up at me and his eyes were so empty it stopped me cold.

"She's gone, Rosaline," he said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "Your mother is gone."

The world basically came to a pause.

And somewhere in that silence, before I could even begin to process what he had just said, my phone buzzed in my hand.

A message from an unknown number.

Four words.

This is just the beginning.

THE CONTRACT

Rosaline's POV

My mother was dead.

I kept repeating it to myself like if I did, it would start to feel real to me. It didn't. It just sat there in my chest. It felt heavy and distant, like something i wasnt ready to accept yet..

The police said it was a heart attack. Quick. She likely didn't suffer.

This was probably supposed to make me feel better.

Except it didn't.

Donald arrived at my parents' house an hour after I called him. He walked straight to me, pulled me into his arms without saying a word and held me while I finally broke down. No pretty tears. Real, ugly tears that came with choking and a feeling of breathlessness.

He rubbed my back and said all the right things and I let myself completely lean on him, because I needed something solid to rely on.

For a moment I forgot about Wesley.

For a moment he was just my husband and I was just a woman who had just lost her mother and needed something to hold on to.

That moment didn't last long enough for me.

The next few days were filled with constant calls from families, friends and relatives I barely knew, each of them offering their condolences. My father looked like a shadow of himself. He ate whenever people put food in front of him. He shook hands, accepted hugs and said thank you with a voice that no longer sounded like his own. Like he was just a shell of the man he once was.

I watched him and I worried.

Donald stayed close for the first two days. Then the business trips started again.

I told myself it was fine. The company he was handling wouldn’t stop just because he had lost something. That's what I told myself anyway.

On the fourth morning after my mother's death I woke up early and for some reason I couldn't go back to sleep. I drove to my parents house before the sun came up. My father was still asleep. The house was quiet. The walls felt empty, like they knew that the person that filled it with color was gone. Like they were grieving with me.

I went to my mother's bedroom.

I don't know what I was looking for exactly. Maybe just to feel close to her. Maybe just to sit somewhere that still smelled like her perfume and wait for some magical moment where she suddenly appears and tell me it's all a bad dream.

I sat on the edge of her bed for a while. Then I started going through things. My hands traced gently. Just straightening, just touching. Her jewelry box. The photographs on her dresser. The little notebook she wrote things so she wouldn’t forget them later on.

Then I noticed the drawer.

The bottom drawer had a small lock on it. I had never paid attention to it before. It had always just been there, just part of the furniture but not special enough for me to actually pay attention to.

Today I paid attention.

I tried looking for clues in the obvious places first. Inside her jewelry. Under the bed. Nothing. Then I looked at the notebook again. I flipped to the last page and there it was, written in between her Netflix password and a pin number.

A four digit code.

I found the small key tucked inside the spine of a book she always kept on her nightstand. My hands were already trembling as I crouched down and opened the drawer.

Inside was a thick envelope.

I took it to the kitchen table. I made myself a cup of tea but didn’t drink it. Then I opened the envelope

The document inside looked formal. It was printed on heavy paper, bound with a metal clip, and stamped at the bottom with two signatures and a notary seal. I had to read the heading twice before I could accept what I was reading.

It was a marriage contract.

A betrothal agreement between my parents and a man named Franklin Hart. I checked the date and it was dated eleven years ago when I was just seventeen.

I read it slowly. It stopped making sense and I read it again.

According to this document, I had been promised to the son of Mr. Franklin. The arrangement was formal. There were legal and financial terms that basically sold me to him for the benefit of both our families. Everything had been laid down without my consent like I wasn’t a human being but a piece of equipment.

And then six years later they had broken the contract.

They had given me to the Mendez family instead. To Donald.

My hands shook so badly that the paper started rustling.

Every illusion of control i thought i had over my own life and love story crumbled and rearranged itself in my head. The betrothal I had resented before slowly coming to accept. Everything that happened between Donald and i.

What part of it was real and what part was arranged? Or did they just move me from one contract to another like they were trying to find the highest bidder at an auction?

I sat at that kitchen table for a long time.

Then I noticed something else in the envelope.

There was a single folded note tucked behind the contract, smaller than the rest. I unfolded it carefully.

The handwriting was sharp and slanted, pressed onto the paper with intentionality. Like they were sending a message.

Your parents thought breaking our agreement would have no consequences. Your mother was the first to learn otherwise. Unfortunately, she couldn’t survive the lesson. Your father will be the next to learn. And you, Mrs. Mendez, you must be curious to know who exactly put a tragic end to the life of your dear mother. Before you bury her, find out who put her in that grave.

— F.H.

The tea cup slipped from my fingers and shattered on the kitchen floor.

My mother didn't have a heart attack.

Someone killed her.