All Chapters of THE WRONG TWIN : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The dinner ended at half past nine, and Sophie spent the last twenty minutes of it convinced that everyone could hear her heart from across the table.Julian hadn't said anything else about the Aston Martin, or about stalling, or about anything that might have been a test in disguise. He'd simply gone quiet in the particular way of someone recalibrating, watching her now with a new kind of attention — not suspicion exactly, or not only suspicion. Something closer to curiosity, which was somehow worse, because suspicion she could have deflected. Curiosity meant he was going to keep looking.When the Calloways finally rose to leave, Edmund kissed her mother's cheek and pressed Sophie's hand between both of his, telling her how radiant she looked, how lucky his son was, how the wedding planner had sent over the final seating chart and wasn't it marvelous how quickly the months had gone. Sophie smiled and nodded and said all the right things, the way she'd been saying all the right things

Sophie didn't cry in the taxi home, though she came close twice.She sat with the note folded into a tight square in her coat pocket, Charlotte's handwriting burned into her memory whether she wanted it there or not. *I had no choice. I can't marry a man I don't know.* As if Sophie had a choice now either. As if her sister hadn't simply walked away from the life they shared and handed Sophie the wreckage of it, dressed it up as an apology, and asked her to carry it alone.It wasn't even the lie that hurt the most. It was the casualness of it — *burn this*, like Sophie was a conspirator in some teenage scheme rather than a woman standing in for her sister at her own wedding, lying to a family, lying to a man who was beginning to look at her like she mattered. Charlotte hadn't asked if Sophie could handle it. She'd simply assumed she would, the way she'd always assumed Sophie would, ever since they were children and Charlotte discovered that her sister's face came with none of the conse

Julian didn't go home after the gallery.He walked instead, the way he did when something was sitting too heavily in his chest to be taken home and set down somewhere and expected to stay put. London at evening was good for that — large enough to lose yourself in, indifferent enough not to ask questions. He walked for forty minutes without any particular destination, hands in his pockets, and replayed the afternoon in the particular involuntary way of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and couldn't seem to stop.She'd blushed.It shouldn't have registered the way it did. He'd touched her cheek for two seconds, practically nothing, a gesture any person might make toward any other person, and she'd gone still in that way she had — like something catching its breath — and when she'd finally looked back at the painting she'd been so deliberately not looking at him that it had taken everything Julian had not to smile.He turned up his collar against the wind and kept walking.He had

The wedding rehearsal was scheduled for six o'clock on Saturday evening, in the same church where Sophie's parents had married twenty-eight years earlier, and where Charlotte was supposed to marry Julian in six days' time.Sophie stood at the back of the nave in a borrowed cardigan, watching the wedding coordinator — a brisk, efficient woman named Priya who carried a clipboard like a weapon — direct the bridal party into position with the patience of someone who had clearly done this a hundred times."Bride and groom, if you wouldn't mind," Priya called, gesturing toward the back of the aisle. "We'll run the processional first, then the vows, then the recessional. Try to walk at the pace you'll actually walk on the day , I've had brides sprint down the aisle before out of nerves and it ruins the photographs."Sophie's stomach turned over. She had been so consumed by the logistics of surviving each individual encounter — the dinners, the gallery, the planning meeting at the Langham tha

Julian texted at half past two on Sunday afternoon, while Sophie was still sitting at the kitchen table with her second cup of tea gone cold and her mother's financial papers burning a hole in her thoughts from two rooms away.The jeweler called. The wedding bands need a final check before they're engraved. I told them I'd come in tomorrow morning. You should probably be there.Sophie stared at the message for a long moment. You should probably be there was doing a lot of work in that sentence. It meant Charlotte should be there. It meant Sophie, playing Charlotte, needed to stand in a jeweler's shop and confirm ring engravings for a wedding that should have belonged to her sister.She typed back: What time.Ten. I'll come by for you at half nine.She put the phone face down on the table and listened to the house settle around her.He arrived at twenty past nine, as he always did — early without announcing it, composed without performing it, standing at the front door in a dark coat w