My Fiancé Kissed My Sister at Our Engagement Party and Told Everyone She Threw Herself at Him, So I Believed My Sister and Left With Her novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ten Memos

In Maddie's rented house, a voice memo from March reveals the coat room was the fourth time Brandon cornered her; outside, his silver car idles at the curb with its lights off.

Maddie's rented house on Birch Street had one lamp that worked.

I turned it on and stood in her kitchen in my navy party dress and my good shoes, still wearing the ring.

She stood in the doorway in her green coat and didn't take it off.

"You didn't ask me," she said.

"Ask you what?"

"If it was true."

I filled her kettle at the sink.

"I watched your hands," I said. "You had them flat on his chest. Nobody pushes like that on purpose and then lies about it."

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half something else.

Then she sat down at the table, right in the coat, and put her face in her sleeves.

I found two mugs and a box of chamomile older than her lease.

The fridge held a lemon, a jar of pickles and a bottle of ketchup.

I made the tea anyway and put hers in front of her.

My phone was buzzing on the counter.

Mom, Mom, Dee, Mom, Brandon.

I turned it face down.

"What did Mom mean?" I said. "We talked about this."

Maddie lifted her head.

"Ask me tomorrow."

"Maddie."

"I'll tell you everything about him tonight. I can't do the Mom part tonight. I'll cry too hard to be useful."

I sat across from her and put both hands around my mug.

"Okay," I said. "Start with him."

She took her phone out and laid it on the table between us.

"I keep these," she said. "Voice memos. After anything he does, I sit in my car and I say what happened out loud, with the date, so I know I didn't make it up."

"Anything."

She looked straight at me.

"Tonight was the fourth time he put his hands on me, Han."

The refrigerator hummed.

A neighbor's dog barked twice and quit.

I didn't say anything because nothing I owned was big enough.

She touched the screen.

A recording started with the sound of a car door shutting.

Then her voice, thin and fast, too close to the microphone.

"March eighth. Three fourteen. I'm in the parking lot of the bridal shop in Eau Claire."

A breath.

"The seamstress went to get pins. Brandon came into the fitting hallway, which, men aren't allowed in the hallway. He held the curtain open so Hannah couldn't see me from the mirror."

The tea in my mug had stopped steaming.

"He said, 'Your sister has the dress, but you have the shoulders.' He put his hand on my back and he moved it. Down."

On the recording, she swallowed.

"He said if I told anybody, he'd tell them I was jealous. I'm not jealous. I'm going to throw up."

Another breath, and then very quietly:

"Saving this so I know I didn't make it up."

The recording ended.

I realized I had my hand over my mouth.

I took it away.

That fitting was the day Maddie had left early.

She had told me she had a migraine.

I had hugged her in the parking lot and told her to drink water.

Brandon had carried my shopping bags to the car and said she looked pale.

"There are ten more," Maddie said. "Some are just things he said. And the texts. He texted me from December, Han. I screenshotted all of it."

"Since December."

"Since three weeks after he proposed to you."

I got up.

I didn't know why until I was at the sink with my back to her.

I gripped the edge of the counter and looked at my reflection in the dark window.

I was the reason he had been able to do it.

Every time Maddie said she was busy, I had believed her.

Every time she left a party early or sat at the far end of the table, I had thought she was sulking.

I had told Mom I'd give her space.

I turned around.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I should have seen it."

"You couldn't."

"I'm a teacher. I notice when a kid goes quiet."

"You noticed," she said. "You just didn't know what it was for."

That undid me a little, and we sat there for a minute not saying anything.

Then I saw it.

Light moved across the ceiling above her stove.

It was the slow sweep of headlights turning in at the curb, then stopping.

The engine kept running, but the headlights went out.

I walked into the front room and moved the curtain one inch.

A silver Equinox sat at the end of the walk, with a man behind the wheel who did not get out.

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