The tattoo is smaller than I expected. A delicate thing, the size of a thumbprint, sitting between her shoulder blades like it's been there forever—except it hasn't, because I remember the exact afternoon she showed me the design on her phone over eggs Benedict.
Her nail tapping the screen: I want this so badly. I told her it would suit her, ordered another coffee, and thought nothing of it at all—because why would I, because sisters don't hide weapons in brunch conversation.
"Odette—oh god, please, let me—" Celine's hand reaches for my arm and my body moves before my brain decides to, spine meeting the doorframe, five fingers up between us.
"What are you doing here." My voice is flat, scraped hollow. "In his flat. In his bathroom. In his towel, Celine."
She opens her mouth, and I watch the performance try to assemble itself behind her eyes—the concern, the careful line. Then her gaze drops to her own hands gripping the towel, and the silence between us fills with steam and the slow drip of the shower head.
"I asked you a question." My nails are pressing crescents into my palms and I cannot make them stop. "Why are you in my fiancé's flat, standing in his shower like you live here?"
"Odette, it's not—please, if you just let me—" Her voice pitches high, desperate, and her fingers clutch the towel like a child holding a blanket.
"The tattoo." The word leaves me like something pulled from a wound. "The woman in the photos. The bare back. The spine. The hair." My vision narrows to the ink between her shoulder blades and something in my chest turns to ice. "That was you."
Her mouth opens, closes, opens again. Then something shifts behind her face, and the cards fall, and what's underneath is worse than any lie she could have told.
She pulls the towel tighter and sits on the edge of the bathtub. The porcelain must be cold against her legs, but she doesn't flinch, and the steadiness of her is obscene.
"Yes." The syllable lands between us and the bathroom shrinks by half, the walls pressing closer, the air thickening until I can taste it.
The floor tilts. Not literally—my feet are planted, my hand is white on the doorframe—but inside my skull, every surface has lost its grip. My pulse is hammering so hard my vision blurs at the edges, and a high-pitched ringing fills my ears like someone has struck a tuning fork inside my head.
I am trying to breathe. The air is warm and damp and tastes like his shampoo, and my stomach turns so violently I have to press my fist against my mouth.
My sister. My sister who knelt in the bridal suite. My sister who held my hand and cried and showed me photographs of herself—of herself—and watched my life collapse like she was watching weather.
"Why?" The word comes out broken, barely a sound, a child's question from a grown woman's throat. "Why would you do this?"
Celine's head snaps up. Something shifts in her face—not guilt, not shame, something older and meaner, something that has been living behind her eyes for longer than I knew there was a room for it.
"You want to know why?" Her voice drops low, stripped raw, a voice I have never heard from her. "Thirty years, Odette. That's why."
My knees are shaking. I press harder into the doorframe because the alternative is the floor, and the floor is not a place I will let her see me.
"Mum and Dad wanted a baby so badly—I was their answered prayer, that's the word Mum wrote in the baby book." Her fingers grip the edge of the tub until the knuckles go yellow. "Then twelve months later, biology did what paperwork couldn't, and you arrived."
"The birthday parties got a little bigger for you. Not by much—just enough for a kid to count the chairs and wonder." She lifts her head, and her eyes are wet, and I hate that the wetness still does something to my chest.
"Family photos, you were always in the centre. Aunties said she looks just like her mother about you and isn't she lovely about me. One sentence about belonging. The other about decoration." She looks me straight in the eyes, as if I coordinated all of it.
My hand has curled against my stomach—reflex, protection, the baby I cannot think about right now.
"Thirty years of being the grateful one, the sweet one, the one who never complains because complaining means ungrateful and ungrateful means returnable." Her voice is thin as paper. "I smiled and I helped and I loved you, and I meant it—I meant every bit of it."
"Until the rehearsal dinner." She stops. Her hands are shaking against the towel's edge. "He stood up and called you the best thing that ever happened to him, and something in me just broke."
I am watching my sister unravel on the rim of a bathtub and I cannot reach for her and I cannot leave. The space between us is three feet and twenty-seven years and I don't know how to cross either.
"He was drunk and I was there and it just happened." Her fingers twist the towel's hem until the fabric bunches white. "After you left, he was destroyed, and I stayed. I was the one who stayed. For the first time in my life, someone chose me."
The mirror behind her is showing me my own face—pale, rigid, jaw set so hard my teeth ache. Someone chose her.
My hand presses harder against my stomach where his baby—the one he doesn't know about—is growing in silence.
"You destroyed my life." I say it quietly, which is worse than screaming, and we both know it. "You knelt in that bridal suite and showed me photos of yourself in my fiancé's bed and held my hand while I fell apart."
"I'm sorry." Her voice breaks fully, a sound from somewhere deep and real, and I want to believe her so badly my teeth hurt. "I'm sorry every single day, Odette."
"You're sorry in his towel, Celine. In his flat. Using his shower." My voice doesn't shake, and I need it not to shake. "Wearing ink I've seen in a photograph that ran under a headline I—"
I stop. Because the next words are a headline I called in, and the arithmetic has just added a column I wasn't prepared for. I destroyed a man's career using evidence my sister handed me. Evidence of herself.
My legs want to fold. I stay vertical through sheer will, my jaw locked so tight the ache radiates into my temples.
"There's something else." Celine's voice is barely a sound. She's looking at her hands, at the towel, at anything that isn't my face. "Something you need to know, and I should have told you before—"
"What." The word leaves me flat and airless, a question with the shape of a door already closed.
She swallows. Her mouth opens, and I can see the shape of whatever confession is climbing up her throat, and my pulse is so loud in my temples I might not hear it even if she manages to speak.
"Odette, I'm—" Keys in the front door. The specific metal sound of a lock turning, followed by the handle, followed by the creak of a hinge I oiled six months ago because it woke me at night.
Celine's mouth closes. My head turns toward the hallway, and through the bathroom doorway, past the unmade bed and the archaeological sink, the front door swings open.