Nikki shook her head so quickly it looked rehearsed. “I’m not sleeping with him.”
“What’s the birthmark on his left hip shaped like?”
Nikki’s mouth parted.
For a fraction of a second, the answer flashed in her eyes before she could stop it. A crescent. That’s what it was. Carissa had known it for ten years. Nikki knew it too.
The room emptied out.
Whatever softness had remained in Carissa hardened cleanly.
“Right,” she said.
“Carissa, wait—”
“No.”
Nikki reached for her arm. Carissa stepped back.
“It’s not what you think.”
“It is exactly what I think.”
Nikki’s eyes filled with tears on cue. “He said you two were basically over.”
“That’s convenient.”
“He said you were always working, always exhausted, always making him feel small.”
Carissa stared at her little sister and felt a fatigue older than either of them. “And that made you sleep with my husband?”
Nikki’s face twisted. “Why do you always say things like that? Like I’m the villain in some movie? You’ve never understood what it’s like to be me.”
Carissa laughed then—not loudly, not bitterly, just once, because the sentence was so offensively ridiculous it broke the air around it.
“No,” she said. “You’re right. I have never known what it’s like to be the person everyone rescues while pretending she’s drowning.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Name it?”
Tears ran down Nikki’s cheeks now, but Carissa saw something underneath them she had rarely allowed herself to name before. Not shame. Not regret. Anger. Nikki hated being seen clearly more than she hated hurting people.
“I loved him too,” Nikki whispered.
Carissa looked at her for a long time.
There are some betrayals so obscene they arrive with their own dark clarity. There is relief inside them—not because they hurt less, but because confusion dies.
“Then you can have him,” Carissa said. “What you cannot have anymore is my money.”
Nikki’s expression changed instantly.
“What?”
“I’m canceling every transfer tonight.”
“Carissa—”
“Your rent, your phone, the car. All of it.”
“You can’t do that to me.”
“Watch me.”
Nikki began crying harder. “I’ll lose this apartment.”
“That sounds like a problem for the woman who thought sleeping with her sister’s husband was a smart long-term housing strategy.”
“You’re being cruel.”
“No,” Carissa said quietly. “I’m being finished.”
She left before Nikki could recover enough to switch tactics.