My Fiancé Chose My Dying Cousin Instead of Me

I called Colt at nine the next morning. I made sure my voice sounded flat, tired, defeated. It wasn't hard. Part of me really did feel that way.

"I'll do it," I said. "I'll stand up there with her."

There was a pause on the other end, and I could hear him breathing, like he was almost afraid to believe it.

"Allie." His voice cracked with relief. "Thank you. God, thank you. I knew you'd come around. You always do the right thing."

I closed my eyes. *You always do the right thing.* Eight years of that sentence, and I was only now hearing what it really meant. It meant I always did what was easy for him.

"Don't thank me," I said. "Just tell her I'll be at the boutique Thursday."

I hung up before he could say anything else. Then I sat down at my laptop, opened a folder labeled *West Coast Accounts*, and started copying files onto a drive that had nothing to do with Burke Enterprises. Eight years of client notes. Eight years of relationship-building, birthday reminders, deal terms I'd negotiated myself while Colt took the credit in board meetings. I documented every contract I'd touched, every account I'd grown. My hands were steady. My chest wasn't, but my hands were.

The weeks that followed had a strange, glassy quality, like I was watching myself through a window. I went to the cake tasting and smiled at seven different flavors of buttercream. I sat through the seating chart meeting and suggested, helpfully, that Diana Burke's second cousin probably shouldn't sit near the open bar. I walked the reception hall with Sabrina on my arm while she pointed at chandeliers and said things like, "Do you think this one's too much? Colt says I deserve too much."

"It's beautiful," I told her. "You deserve exactly what you're getting."

She didn't catch it. She never caught anything that wasn't aimed directly at her ego.

At the venue walkthrough, she looped her arm through mine in front of the wedding planner and said, "Isn't she the most generous soul? Stepping up like this, after everything." Her eyes were wet, right on cue. "I don't know what I'd do without my cousin."

"Someone has to hold the flowers," I said, and smiled until my face ached.

She loved to flash the ring. She'd stretch her fingers out over a swatch of table linen, tilt her hand so the light caught the stone, then glance at my bare finger like she was checking a scoreboard. "Colt has such good taste," she said once, at the florist, holding a peony up next to the diamond like they were in competition. "He always did."

I filed it away. Every flash of that ring went into the same drawer in my chest where I kept the sound of the champagne glass breaking on the marble. I wasn't collecting grievances anymore. I was collecting evidence.

Kalani called every few days with updates, her voice low and businesslike, the voice she used at work when she was tracking something that mattered.

"Got the texts," she said one night. "She told a friend, quote, 'the kidney thing is basically foolproof, nobody questions a dying girl.' Timestamped. Three weeks before the engagement party."

"Metadata?"

"Verified. Chain of custody's clean. I've got screenshots of the real hospital records next to the ones she gave Colt. Side by side, they don't even try to match font sizes. It's almost insulting how sloppy she got."

"She's never been caught before," I said. "Why would she start being careful now."

Kalani went quiet for a second. "I found the voicemail too."

I knew which one she meant before she said it. My stomach dropped anyway.

"She sent it to a friend as a joke," Kalani said, gentler now. "Laughing about the donor match. Laughing about your mom, Allie. I listened to it twice to confirm the voice and then I had to walk outside for a while."

I sat with the phone against my ear and didn't say anything. Outside my window, the city kept moving like nothing was wrong, cabs and construction noise and somebody's dog barking three floors down.

"And the stairwell," Kalani said. "Security footage from your old building. It's grainy, but it's clear enough. You can see her hand on your back. You can see her step away right after, like nothing happened."

I pressed my palm flat against my sternum, right where the soda tab used to sit against my skin before I started tucking it under my shirt again these past weeks, a habit I couldn't seem to break even now.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?" Kalani repeated. "That's it? Okay?"

"I need it all clean. Documented. Nothing they can spin."

"It's clean," she said. "It's airtight. Allie, are you sure you want to wait? We could end this today."

I looked at the seating chart still open on my laptop, Sabrina's name in the center of the head table in careful calligraphy.

"No," I said. "Let her have the whole room first. Let her have all of it. Then we take it away in front of everyone she ever wanted to impress."

Kalani laughed, short and sharp, no humor in it at all. "Remind me never to make you my enemy."

"You never had to worry about that," I said, and for the first time in weeks, I meant a smile all the way through.