My Twin Took My Husband. I Kept the Billions. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Test

Hallie names a lot nobody has bought yet and Reese's face gives her away.

"Ask her," I told Wayne.

"I'm asking you."

"I don't know," I said, and it was half true.

I didn't know how she had done it. I only knew that she had.

I left him on the porch with his taillight and went to find my sister.

Reese was in the old sunroom at the back of the house, sitting on the piano bench with her shoes off.

She had always done that. She took off her shoes in any room she wanted to own.

She looked up when I came in, and her face went soft and sweet.

It was a good face. It was mine.

"Hallie! I was hoping you'd come." She patted the bench. "Sit. We're going to be sisters-in-law forever, in a weird way. Isn't that funny?"

"You told Wayne his plate number."

"Did I?" She laughed. "I was nervous. I probably said all kinds of things."

"You said it to him in a whisper."

"Then he misheard me."

She stretched her arm along the lid of the piano and tilted her head.

It was the same smile she had used on our father when she broke the greenhouse window at nine years old.

I took one step closer and kept my voice light.

"Giles's lending me money to buy a lot," I said. "On Harbor Street, by the water. Nobody's bid on it yet."

"That's nice."

"It's an empty lot. Gravel, an old fence, a sign for a bait shop."

"That's nice, Hallie."

"I'm going to build something tall on it."

Her thumb stopped moving on the piano lid.

It was a small thing.

Nobody else in the world would have seen it, because nobody else had watched her face for twenty-four years, and then for ten more in a different life.

The sweetness stayed on her mouth, but her eyes sharpened.

They went from my face to my hands, and they stayed on my hands.

She was counting.

She was working out whether I knew what she knew.

"A building," she said. "How ambitious."

"Isn't it?"

"You've never wanted to build anything."

"I'm new at it."

"You're new at a lot of things today, aren't you?" She slid off the bench and stood close to me, close enough that I could smell her perfume.

It was the one she hadn't started wearing until she was thirty.

She had not worn it yet in this year.

"You came back too," I said.

I had meant to make her say it.

I couldn't wait.

Reese's smile dropped away.

What was underneath was colder than I remembered, and younger, and a little relieved.

"Oh, thank God," she said quietly. "I was starting to think I was alone with it."

"You're not alone."

"No. I'm not." She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, the way she used to when we were girls.

I let her.

I wanted to see what she would do.

"I want to say something to you, Hallie, and I want you to listen."

"I'm listening."

"I've had three weeks of this. Three weeks of waking up in my bed at twenty-four, thinking, I get to do it again." She smiled.

"And I've thought about it every day. Where I went wrong last time."

"You went wrong when you pushed me."

"No." She shook her head, almost fondly. "I went wrong when I chose the man who never made anything. Giles Livingston had the money and no idea how to turn it into more. Wayne had no money and a wife who could turn anything into more."

My stomach tightened.

"You couldn't turn him into anything," I said. "You never even tried."

"I didn't have to. I watched you do it for ten years." She patted my cheek. "You were so good, Hallie. Every night you sat up with the numbers, every morning you told him what to say. He never made a single decision you didn't make for him."

"And you want that."

"I want the part where it's mine."

She stepped back.

She picked her shoes up off the floor and held them by the straps.

"I'll be perfectly nice about it, you know. I'll come to your wedding. I'll cry. We're sisters."

"You killed me."

"And you woke up." Her voice was light. "It all worked out."

"It did not."

She walked to the door and turned around, with her shoes still hanging from her fingers.

"Last time you built it for him," Reese said. "This time I collect."

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