The first time Valerie ever accused me of wanting something that belonged to her, we were kids.
We were in the hallway outside our bedrooms, the kind with worn carpet and framed school photos lined up like trophies. Mom had just hung a little American flag magnet on the metal door of the laundry room—one of those souvenir things she bought every Fourth of July because she liked the way it made the house feel “patriotic.” Valerie saw me touch it and snapped, like I’d tried to steal a diamond.
“That’s mine,” she said.
“It’s on the door,” I said.
“Everything in this house is mine first,” she said, and she believed it.
So when she told two hundred wedding guests that I was obsessed with her husband, part of me wasn’t even shocked.
I was just… tired.
I’m Reese—Ree to everyone who’s ever wanted to shrink me down to something harmless. Valerie and I were never close growing up. She was the golden child, the pretty one, the one who got the bedroom with the bigger window and the better sunlight for her vanity mirror. I was the younger sister who tagged along and learned early how to disappear without leaving.
When I turned twenty-two, I moved three states away for work. I told everyone it was about the job. That wasn’t a lie. But it also wasn’t the full truth.
Distance did what our family never could.
With the miles between us, Valerie and I started texting like normal people. We sent memes. We had actual conversations. For the first time in my life, I thought maybe we could be real sisters. The kind who know each other’s coffee orders. The kind who can laugh without keeping score.
That was the bet I made.
I bet that if I showed up for her, she’d finally stop seeing me as competition.
Then she met Drew.
The name hit me first, like a small rock dropped into a glass of iced tea.
“His name is Drew,” she said over the phone, bright and breathless. “And he’s… different. He’s calm. He’s stable.”
I asked for a picture, mostly out of habit.
She texted it.
And I laughed.
Not mean-laughed. Not jealous-laughed. Just a quick, surprised sound at the fact that life had a twisted sense of humor.
Because I knew him.
Drew was a guy I’d gone on exactly two dates with back in college. Two awkward coffee dates where we realized we had zero chemistry. We talked about economics homework and the weather like two people stuck in an elevator. After the second date, we both drifted away without drama, without bitterness. A mutual ghosting so mild it barely counted.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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