My Husband Cheated with My Twin Sister (Her Marriage in Crisis #62)

1. Charly

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Charly

“You can stop holding the menu like that,” Adam says, reaching across the table to pry it gently out of my grip. “It’s not a hostage.”

“This place has a market price on the fish. A market price. Do you understand what that means to a woman who budgets her coffee?”

“It means we splurge for one night and then eat cereal for a week. Worth it.” He pours my water himself before the staff can get to it, because he knows hovering waiters make my skin crawl. “Drink. Breathe. You look beautiful, by the way. You haven’t let me say it yet.”

“You said it in the car.”

“I said it to your reflection in the visor mirror while you were fixing your lipstick. Doesn’t count.” His thumb brushes the inside of my wrist where my pulse is doing its usual embarrassing thing around him. “You look beautiful, Charly. I plan on saying it until you stop arguing.”

“Then we’ll be here all night.” I pull my hand back, fussing with the napkin, because the room is getting to me.

The candlelight. The white tablecloths. The couples who clearly come to places like this more than once a year, glancing at us when we walked in.

“I added it up in my head when we sat down. This dinner is half a car payment.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’ve been saving for it.” He reaches across the table and folds my hand into his. Both of his wrapped around it. “Hey. Look at me, not at the prices. There are two people in this room I care about and one of them stole your dress.”

And I let her have it, because watching the two of them needle each other across a dinner table is its own small miracle.

None of the men before Adam ever bothered with Rebecca.

Adam got close to her right away, and honestly it still gets me sometimes, the fact that the man I love and the sister I’ve had my whole life actually like each other.

“It’s borrowed,” Rebecca says, sliding back into her chair from the restroom in my green wrap dress, which she has now possessed longer than I ever did. My sister enters every room as if it applauded for her. Glossy dark waves.

Our mother’s cheekbones. We share a face, technically, same brown eyes, same stubborn chin, and the genetic lottery still rigged the styling in her favor. “And before you start, Charly-bear, you abandoned this dress in March. I rescued it. It was a humanitarian act.”

“You’re wearing my clothes to my celebration dinner.”

“I’m wearing our clothes to our celebration dinner.” She flicks her napkin open, beaming at the both of us. “In charge of the whole night shift now. My baby sister, running an entire emergency room. Mom should be unbearable about this. She should have the promotion letter laminated.”

“If she’d called me back, maybe she would.”

The laugh comes out of me with a crack down the middle of it.

Adam’s hand tightens around mine under the table. Three years and he still catches it before I do. That little hitch I get whenever Mom comes up.

The particular ache of being the daughter who calls and gets voicemail, who sends the big news and gets a thumbs-up four days late, while Rebecca gets the phone calls and the lunches and the framed photos on the hall wall.

“She didn’t even text back about the promotion. People in that ER look at me to know what to do, and my own mother left me on read.”

“She’s proud, she just shows it sideways.

” Rebecca’s voice goes soft, and she reaches over and hooks her pinky through mine on the tablecloth, the way we’ve done since we were six and scared of thunderstorms. “You know how she is. She gets weird about the fact that you went and built a whole life without needing her for any of it. She used to brag about you to the pharmacist, Char. The poor man knew your GPA. She just can’t ever say it to your face. ”

“She told my burn story to her entire bridge club,” Adam offers, topping up Rebecca’s wine without being asked. “I met her exactly four times and three of those times she introduced me as the idiot who fought a pan.”

“Because you are the idiot who fought a pan.” I wipe under my eyes with one knuckle, careful of my eye makeup, laughing and leaking at the same time.

“A grown man with a Band-Aid up to his wrist, telling me with a completely straight face that the recipe said trust yourself, so he cooked the whole thing with his eyes shut.”

“And then the meanest, funniest, most beautiful woman alive looked at my hand and said, quote, ‘Did you fight the pan? Did the pan win?’” He kisses my knuckles, right there over the bread plates, unhurried, while a waiter pretends not to notice. “Best two hundred dollars my insurance ever spent.”

“You came back the next week with a burn on the other hand.”

“I held it against a radiator on purpose. We’ve established this. I have no regrets and minimal scarring.”

“You could have just asked for my number.”

My voice does an inconvenient wobble. Because three years later that story still gets me, this man with his stupid trust-yourself burns who looked at an exhausted ER nurse with vending machine dinner on her scrubs and decided she was worth a second injury.

“You were wearing a badge that said do not flirt with staff.”

“I made that badge myself. You would not believe how many people think turning on the charm with a nurse gets them moved up the line. Every single shift, somebody with a stubbed toe batting their eyes at me like it’ll bump them ahead of the guy having an actual heart attack.

I got tired of saying no, so I had the badge laminated and let it do the talking. ”

“In my defense, I respected that badge for one entire week.”

“One week. Then you came back with the radiator hand and asked me to dinner before I’d even finished dressing it.”

“I’m a slow learner with excellent follow-through.”

He grins. And the grin still does what it did in that exam bay. Drops the floor out from under me an inch.

The food starts arriving then. Scallops I didn’t order because he ordered for me at the door, extra lemon, no foam. The duck already promised with the sauce quarantined from the potatoes.

He’s good at this. The noticing, the way he just remembers the little stuff about me.

And I hate it, a little, how easy he is in a room that’s got me doing math in my head.

He reads the wine list like it’s a takeout menu, totally chill, while I’m over here recounting the flowers on the table for the third time.

Rebecca catches me. Of course she does.

“Stop counting the flowers, Charly.”

“I’m not counting the flowers.” I was counting the flowers. “I’m admiring them.”

“You’re calculating them. I can hear it.” She points her fork at me. “Let the man feed you scallops. You worked a twelve-hour shift this morning and ate a granola bar standing up in a supply closet. You’re allowed one nice night without overthinking it.”

“His mother thinks I overthink everything. She thinks I have a spreadsheet titled Marriage Assets.”

“My mother called my college roommate a deadbeat. He’s a pediatric surgeon now, godfather to half the family.

She told me my best friend would never amount to anything.

He runs three restaurants.” He sets his fork down, slow.

“She has been wrong about every single person I ever brought home and loved. Every one. So I don’t care what she thinks you are. I stopped caring a long time ago.”

He says it without heat, but his jaw sets. And the set of it tells the truth his voice won’t. There have been phone calls I wasn’t on. Dinners that went badly. He’s never once let it reach me. I only ever feel the wind off the door he keeps closing.

“She called me the nurse at Christmas. To my face. With my name on the place card.”

“And I drove us home before dessert.” He holds my gaze, steady, no apology in it because he already gave me that apology in the car that night, parked outside my building with his hands strangling the wheel.

“Charly. I will eat hospital cafeteria Jell-O for every holiday for the rest of my life before I let anyone make you small. Including her. Especially her.”

A good quiet settles over the table. Rebecca looks between us with her eyes already glassing over, and I have to bully a breath down past the knot in my chest.

“Okay. Enough of that.” I reach for my wine and drain a third of it. “We’re celebrating. Somebody say a joke before I ruin my makeup.”

Adam doesn’t say a joke.

Adam pushes his chair back and stands.

“I want to say a thing,” he announces, glass in hand.

And my stomach drops through the floor of this restaurant we cannot afford, because Adam doesn’t give toasts.

Adam mocks toasts. Adam once stood up at his cousin’s wedding, said “to open bars,” and sat back down to thunderous applause and his mother’s visible aneurysm.

His gaze sweeps across the table. It catches on Rebecca. Snags, for a breath, the two of them sharing something I’m too lit up to read.

“Shame Clarence couldn’t make it,” I say, because the empty fourth chair has been nagging at me since we sat down. “Three years and I don’t think your brother’s said more than four words to me at a stretch.”

“He sends his apologies. Work, always work. Some deal that won’t close itself.” Something passes over Adam’s face, there and gone. “Don’t take it personally. He’s like that with everyone.” He says it lightly, but the chair stays empty, and he doesn’t look at it.

And then his gaze comes to me and stays.

“Bear with me, Charly.”

He stops. Breathes. Starts over.

“Three years ago you stitched up my hand and made me laugh while you did it.” His thumb runs over his own scar without him noticing. “And you had no clue who I was. You called me sir. You told me to quit being dramatic and hold still.”

A soft sound goes around the table.

“I went home that night and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not the hand. The way you looked at me.” He stops. Starts again, quieter. “Like I was just some guy. Some guy who did a dumb thing and got hurt and needed somebody to take care of him.”

His eyes don’t leave mine.