Charlie's POV:

The terrace doors swing shut behind me, cutting the ballroom noise down to a bass thrum through the glass.

The night air is cold enough that my arms break out in goosebumps, and the champagne in my hand has gone flat. I lean against the stone railing and look out at the ocean, black and patient, doing its tidal thing like it doesn’t care that my mother just got married for the fourth time.

The door opens again.

I know it’s her from the sound of the heels alone—a rhythm I’ve been tracking for two weeks without meaning to.

“You followed me.”

“I wanted air.”

“There’s another door on the other side of the ballroom.”

Vivi settles beside me at the railing, close enough that her shoulder almost touches mine. She’s still in the midnight-blue dress from the ceremony, the one that makes her look like she was poured into it rather than wearing it. Her hair is starting to come loose from whatever architectural thing the stylist did to it this morning, one dark strand curling against her jaw.

“This one was closer,” she says.

“Sure.”

We stand there.

The music from inside is a muffled pulse. Somewhere below us, a couple walks along the beach path with a flashlight, two small dots of light moving across the sand.

“Charlie.”

“Mm.”

“Are we going to talk about it, or are we going to do this for the rest of our lives?”

I turn to look at her.

Her profile is all clean lines—the sculpted cheekbone, the straight nose, the mouth that I know now, in a way I didn’t twenty-four hours ago, knows exactly how to curve against mine.

The light spilling through the ballroom doors catches her in amber and shadow.

I hate how beautiful she is.

I hate how much I want to keep looking.

“Do you wish we hadn’t?” I ask.

Her eyes move to mine.

“Slept together.”

She doesn’t answer right away.

She’s doing the thing she does—the cataloguing, the weighing, the internal ledger. Three weeks ago, I would’ve filled the silence just to make her uncomfortable.

Now I’ve learned to wait her out.

“No,” she says finally. “That’s the problem.”

“Yeah.”

I take a sip of the flat champagne and make a face.

“It would be a lot easier if I could blame it on the whiskey.”

“You barely drank anything.”

“I know.” I set the glass on the railing. “I was stone-cold sober, Vivienne. Every minute of it.”

She looks at me then, and there’s something in her expression I can’t quite name—the same thing that was there in the elevator, in the bar, in the moment before she kissed me.

It isn’t softness, exactly.

It’s more like the moment before a decision, held open.

“So was I,” she says.

Inside, the band launches into something with a beat. I can hear Cate’s laugh through the glass, bright and unmistakable.

The sound of a woman having the best night of her life.

I glance toward the ballroom.

“We should go back in.”

“We should.”

Neither of us moves.

I look at her.

She looks at me.

“You first,” I say. “Otherwise it looks like we came out here together.”

“We did come out here together.”

“Not on purpose.”

Vivi’s mouth does something that isn’t quite a smile.

“Fine.”

She straightens, smoothing the front of her dress, and reaches for the door.

Then she stops.

“Charlie.”

“Yeah?”

“Your necklace is twisted again.”

I look down.

The clasp has migrated around to the front, the way it always does, a small silver knot resting just below my collarbone.

I reach up to fix it.

Vivi gets there first.

Two fingers settle against my throat.

Warm.

Precise.

She adjusts the chain with the kind of concentration that would almost make it impersonal if I didn’t know better now.

She’s done this before.

In the hall at the house, three weeks ago, the night she told me about Margot.

Back then, four seconds of her fingers against my skin had felt like something I shouldn’t examine too closely.

Now her knuckles brush the hollow of my throat and I forget how breathing works.

“There,” she says.

Her hand drops.

I stare at her.

Vivi opens the door.

“Ten seconds,” she says.

Then she goes inside.

I look at the closed door.

“Bossy,” I mutter.

I count to ten anyway.

The ballroom is chaos in the best way.

Two hundred people who all know each other’s parents, all drinking from the same apparently bottomless champagne supply, all congratulating one another on a marriage that has absolutely nothing to do with them.

I thread between tables and find mine just as the salads are being cleared.

“There you are.”

Cate catches my wrist before I can sit down, her face flushed and radiant.

“I was starting to think you’d been kidnapped.”

“Just needed air.”

“You look tired, sweetheart.”

She cups my face for a second, the way she’s done since I was small, her thumb brushing my cheek.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m great.” I smile at her. “It’s a beautiful wedding.”

Her entire face lights up.

“Isn’t it?”

She glances across the table, where Alex is deep in conversation with Jonathan about something that apparently requires both of them to nod very seriously.

“Alexander’s been walking around all day looking like he won something.”

“He kind of did.”

Cate looks at me.

I shrug.

“What? You’re a catch.”

Her expression softens.

“Oh, baby.”

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were going to get emotional.”

“I am allowed to be emotional. It’s my wedding.”

“It’s your fourth wedding. You should have developed an immunity by now.”

She gasps.

I grin.

“There she is,” she says, pleased.

I roll my eyes and reach for my champagne.

Cate looks across the table again.

“Look at them. They’re actually getting along.”

“Dad’s on his best behavior.”

“He promised he would be.”

Her voice changes slightly.

Not enough for anyone else to notice.

Enough for me.

“He told me he wanted to be here for you.”

I look at Jonathan.

He’s saying something to Alex now, one hand moving as he talks. Alex laughs.

I don’t say anything.

The waiter refills my champagne.

I let him.

Cate reaches for her own glass.

“You and Vivi both disappeared for a minute.”

Every muscle in my body goes still.

“Just for some air.”

“She seems a little off tonight, don’t you think?”

I take a drink.

“Vivi.”

“I gathered.”

Cate studies me with her cocktail-party eyes, the ones that somehow miss nothing even when she’s smiling.

“Did you two have a fight?”

“No.”

“You’d tell me if you did.”

“Mom.”

“I’m only asking.”

“We’re fine.” I force myself to relax against the chair. “It’s just a lot, right? Her dad getting married. She’s processing.”

Cate’s expression immediately softens.

“Of course she is.”

There.

Crisis averted.

I reach for my water.

“There she is,” Cate says.

I freeze with the glass halfway to my mouth.

Of course.

I look up.

Vivi is approaching the table.

She has somehow managed to restore herself completely in the approximately ninety seconds since I last saw her. Hair immaculate except for that one loose strand. Expression composed. Shoulders straight.

Not a single visible indication that fifteen minutes ago she had her fingers against my throat while we discussed the fact that neither of us regrets sleeping together.

Psychopath.

“Vivienne.” Cate smiles as Vivi reaches us. “Come sit down.”

Vivi looks at me.

I look at Vivi.

Her eyes flick once to the water in my hand.

Then back to my face.

“I was just asking Charlie if you two had a fight,” Cate says.

Jesus Christ.

Vivi pauses.

It’s microscopic.

I only notice because I’ve become some kind of unwilling Vivienne Ashford scholar.

“No,” she says.

“See?” I tell Cate.

Cate looks between us.

“You’re both being strange.”

“We’re always strange.”

“You are. Vivi isn’t.”

Vivi takes the empty chair beside me.

“I’m adapting.”

I bite the inside of my cheek.

Cate considers this.

Then, apparently satisfied, she reaches across the table for Alexander’s abandoned champagne.

“Good. Because I refuse to mediate my daughters on my wedding day.”

My champagne goes down the wrong pipe.

I choke.

Vivi slides my water toward me before I can reach for it.

Automatic.

Effortless.

Her hand withdraws immediately.

Cate is already distracted by someone calling her name from the next table.

I take a long drink.

Vivi looks straight ahead.

I lean slightly toward her.

“Your fault,” I whisper.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly.”

Her mouth twitches.

I see it.

Nobody else does.

Which, I’m beginning to realize, is becoming a problem.

I let the moment sit, then let it go.

Because it's her wedding. My mother is somewhere in this room in a dress she chose after four fittings and a crying jag in the atelier bathroom I wasn't supposed to know about, and she is laughing at something a man I've never met just said to her, and her hand is on Alexander's arm the way it used to be on my father's arm, back when I was small and thought that was just how arms worked.

"Charlie."

It's Jonathan. He has a fresh glass and the particular looseness of a man who's had three, and he's looking at me like he's about to say something he rehearsed in the car.

"Dad."

"Can I steal you for a minute?"

I glance at Vivi. She's already turned away, giving me the exit like she's been doing all night, like she's been doing it for weeks. Which she has.

"Sure."

He walks me toward the terrace doors — not outside, just the edge of them, where the noise thins enough to talk. His tie is a little crooked. He did it himself, I can tell, because my mother would never have let a knot sit that way. He's been doing his own ties for eleven years.

"I wanted to say something," he says.

"So say it."

"I'm proud of you."

I look at the champagne in my hand.

"I know I'm late to things," he says. "I know that's — I know that's a pattern. Your mother used to call it my grand entrance."

"She still does."

"Yeah." He laughs, sort of. "Look. I saw you tonight. You've got your mother's whole thing going, the room thing, but you're — you're steadier than I was at your age. Than I am now, probably."

"That's a low bar, Dad."

"It is." He drinks. "Still counts."

I don't say anything. He doesn't either. We stand there with the band thumping through the doors and the ocean out past the railing, black and loud, and I let it be what it is, which is not enough and also more than I expected, and I don't ruin it by naming it.

"Go dance with your mother," I say finally. "She'll cry."

"She's already crying."

"She'll cry harder."

He grins and goes.

I watch him cross the floor and cut in on Alex, who surrenders Cate with a look of relief so genuine it makes me laugh out loud, alone, at the edge of a wedding, holding a glass of champagne that's somehow gone flat again.

The band shifts. Something slow. The dance floor empties out and refills with couples who actually know how to do this, and I watch the older ones, the ones who've been married so long they don't have to count.

A hand lands on my elbow.

"You're brooding."

Nadia. She's in a deep green dress with a glass of something that isn't champagne, and she's looking at me with an expression that is way too knowing for someone I've met twice.

"I'm enjoying the ambiance."

"You're standing at the edge of your mother's wedding looking like you're deciding whether to leave."

"I was deciding whether to get more champagne."

"Liar." She sips her drink. "Where's Vivi?"

"Somewhere. She's a popular woman."

"She's hiding." Nadia says it easily, like it's a fact about weather. "She does that. When she's —" She waves a hand. "Whatever she's doing. She disappears for ten minutes and comes back and acts like she was never gone."

I take a drink so I don't have to look at her.

"Anyway," Nadia says. "I came over here to tell you that you should dance with her at some point tonight. It'll make your mother happy."

"My mother doesn't need me to —"

"Your mother literally told me at the cocktail hour that she wants a picture of the two of you dancing."

"She did not."

"She absolutely did. She said, and I'm quoting, 'I want one picture of my girls before the night is over.'"

Something in my chest does a small, stupid thing.

"Yeah," I say. "Okay."

Nadia's eyes narrow.

"Huh," she says.

"What."

"Nothing." She drinks. "You're just — huh." She walks off before I can ask again.

I stand there for another minute. Then I put the flat champagne on a passing tray and go find my mother.

She's on the dance floor with Jonathan, of all people, and they're both laughing with their heads tipped back in a way that makes them look like the version of themselves from before I was born, before the divorce, before all of it. Alex is at the edge of the floor with his phone out, filming them, and I want to tell him to stop and I also want him to keep going forever.

I cut in.

"May I?"

Jonathan steps back with a little bow that's mostly ironic. "She's all yours."

Cate takes my hands.

"Finally," she says.

"What?"

"I've been waiting all night for you to come find me."

"You've been busy being a bride."

"I've been busy being a bride for approximately six hours. The rest of the day I was just a woman with too many opinions about flower arrangements." She squeezes my fingers. "You look beautiful. Did I tell you that?"

"Twice."

"Good." She looks at me, close, the way she does when she's really seeing me and not just being my mother. "You're okay?"

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

She studies me for another second. Then she lets it go — she's a lot of things, my mother, but she knows when to stop pushing, which is a skill she's acquired late and which I appreciate more than I say.

"Dance with me," she says. "Properly. Like when you were small."

"I was terrible at that."

"You were wonderful at that."

We dance. She's better than me, obviously, but she lets me lead poorly and pretends not to notice, and for one song it's just us, the way it used to be in the kitchen when I was ten and she'd put on the radio and we'd spin around the island until the pasta boiled over. She hums. I step on her foot. She laughs like it's the funniest thing that's ever happened.

The song ends. She kisses my cheek and goes to find Alex, and I stand on the edge of the floor with my hands empty and my face hurting from smiling.

Then the band starts something slower.

And Vivi is there.

She's just — there, beside me, like she materialized, and she's looking at the dance floor instead of at me, and she says, in that flat way she has, "Your mother asked me to dance with you."

"She asked me too."

"Then I suppose we should."

"For the picture."

She holds out her hand. I take it.

Her palm is cool. Her fingers close around mine with a certainty that has no business being in a handshake-adjacent gesture, and she pulls me onto the floor like she's been waiting to do it for an hour, which — knowing her — she probably has.

Her other hand finds my waist.

I put my hand on her shoulder.

And then we're dancing, and it's nothing, it's a wedding, it's two stepsisters doing the thing their mother asked them to do. That's what it looks like from outside. That's what it looks like to Cate, who is beaming at us from across the room with her phone in her hand. That's what it looks like to Alex, who is nodding along to something Nadia's wife is saying. That's what it looks like to the photographer, who takes a shot and moves on.

That's not what it is.

Because her hand is at my waist and I know exactly what her hand feels like lower, and higher, and on the back of my neck when she wants me to look at her. Because she's leading, subtly, the way she does everything, and I'm letting her, the way I apparently do now. Because my thumb is at the seam of her dress and I know what's under it and she knows I know.

"You're holding me rather tightly," I murmur.

"I'm dancing."

"You're gripping."

"I'm ensuring you don't wander off."

"I don't wander."

"You wander constantly." Her mouth is near my ear, low enough that no one else can hear it. "You've been wandering since the moment you walked into my house."

I laugh, quiet. "We agreed this wasn't happening again."

"We did."

"You're holding me like it's happening again right now."

Her hand loosens immediately. Instantly. Like a switch. Like she's been caught.

I lean in.

"I didn't tell you to stop."

She goes still. Her hand stays where it is — loose, now, careful, an inch of air between her palm and my dress — and her face does that thing where nothing moves and everything moves, and I watch her decide something and then decide it again.

She doesn't pull away.

She doesn't pull me closer either.

We dance the rest of the song that way, an inch apart, and it's the most obscene thing I've ever done in public.

The song ends.

She steps back. Drops her hand. Nods at me like we've just concluded a business meeting.

"Thank you for the dance," she says.

"Anytime."

She walks away.

I stand there for a second with my hands at my sides, and then I go get another drink, because that's what you do at a wedding.

The next hour, I behave.

I really do. I dance with Alex, who is a surprisingly good dancer and who tells me a story about Cate that I've never heard, involving a hotel in Lisbon and a lost shoe. I dance with Nadia's husband, who is six foot four and terrible at this. I dance with a man named Whitaker who turns out to be Alex's oldest friend and who calls me "young lady" in a way I decide to find charming.

I talk to my father. I talk to my mother. I let Cate take approximately forty photographs of me with various people, including one where she makes me stand next to Vivi and put my arm around her, and Vivi's shoulder is warm under my hand, and I keep my face still, and I smile.

And the whole time, I feel her.

Not touching me. Watching me.

I catch it four times. Once when I'm laughing at something Whitaker said and I look up and Vivi is across the room with a glass in her hand and her eyes on me, and the second I meet them she looks away. Once when I'm dancing with Alex and I turn and she's at the bar, watching, and again — away. Once when I'm standing with Nadia and I feel it on the back of my neck like a hand, and I turn and she's in conversation with someone and her eyes slide off me like they were never there.

Once when I'm doing nothing at all, just standing by the table with a glass of water, and she's looking at me from the doorway and she doesn't look away.

She holds it.

Three seconds. Four. Long enough that anyone watching would notice.

Then she turns and walks out of the ballroom.

I stay.

I stay because that's the sensible thing. I stay because my mother is on the dance floor with her new husband and the band is playing something that everyone knows and the room is warm and full and I am part of it. I stay because leaving would mean something.

I stay for twenty minutes.

I dance. I laugh. I refill my water. I let Cate hug me. I listen to a man explain his boat to me.

And the whole time, my body is pointed at the door like a compass.

I give it ten more minutes. I'm generous with myself. I talk to Jonathan about his drive up. I ask Nadia about her wife, who couldn't come. I let the photographer take one more picture. I do everything a good daughter does at her mother's wedding.

Then I put my glass down and I walk out.

The hallway is a different world.

The noise of the reception drops to a distant thrum, bass and brass, like a party heard through water. The carpet is the deep red of every hotel that has ever pretended to be historic. The lights are low, sconces spaced too far apart, and the whole corridor is empty except for one figure standing at the far end, near the elevators, with her back to me.

Vivi.

She doesn't turn around.

She's standing in front of the elevator doors with her arms crossed, her head tilted slightly, like she's reading the floor indicator. Her shoes are off. She's holding them in one hand, one finger hooked through the straps, and her bare feet are on the carpet, and for some reason that's the thing that gets me, the shoes, the bare feet, the private smallness of it.

I walk down the hall.

My heels are loud. She hears them. Her shoulders shift half an inch and then settle, and she still doesn't turn around, and I know — I know — that she's known it was me since the first step.

"You followed me," she says, to the elevator doors.

"I wanted air."

"There's a terrace."

"There's a hallway."

She turns around then. Slowly. Her face is composed, but her hair has fully come down now, that one strand having won its war, and she's got her lipstick slightly worn off at the center, and she looks at me with those blue eyes and doesn't bother to pretend.

"Charlie."

"Vivi."

"You're supposed to be at the reception."

"So are you."

"I was getting some air."

"You're at the elevators."

"I was considering the air upstairs."

"In your room."

"In my room." She says it without flinching. "Yes."

I stop a few feet away from her. The hallway stretches behind me, four doors down and four doors down again, and the reception hums somewhere below us like a heartbeat in another room.

"You left without saying anything," I say.

"I said thank you for the dance."

"That's not what I mean."

She doesn't answer that.

I look at her. She's standing there with her shoes in her hand and her hair down and her dress wrinkled at the waist from dancing, and she looks, for the first time since I've known her, like she's not sure what she's doing. Like the plan didn't include this part.

"This is a terrible idea," she says.

I laugh. It comes out quiet, in the empty hallway.

"You said that last night."

"I did."

"And it didn't stop you."

"It didn't."

"So why say it now?"

She looks at me for a long moment. The elevator dings behind her, opens, sits there empty, and closes again, and neither of us moves.

"Because last night I could blame it on something," she says. "The whiskey. The wedding. The hour. I had — reasons. I had a whole list of them by the time I woke up."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight I'm sober. It's not even midnight. My father is downstairs dancing with your mother and they are married now, legally, which makes you and me —"

"Sisters."

"Stepsisters."

"Same thing."

"Not the same thing."

"Close enough for the point you're making."

She exhales. It's almost a laugh. Almost.

"We talked about it," she says. "This morning. We agreed it was a mistake. We agreed it wouldn't happen again. We agreed —"

"We agreed a lot of things."

"We did."

"And here we are."

"Here we are."

I take a step closer.

She doesn't move.

I take another. Close enough now that I could touch her if I reached out. Close enough that I can see the small line between her brows, the one that shows up when she's cataloguing something she can't file.

"Tell me to go back," I say.

She looks at me.

"Tell me to go back to the reception," I say. "Tell me we made a mistake and it was a one-time thing and we're going to be normal stepsisters who share a house and never talk about it. Tell me you don't want this. I'll go. I'll walk back down that hallway and I'll dance with Whitaker and I'll never bring it up again."

Her eyes drop.

To my mouth.

Just for a second. Just long enough.

Then back up.

"I can't," she says.

I kiss her.

This time I do it first. This time I know exactly where her mouth is and how she tastes and what she does with her hand when she wants me closer, and I don't have to find any of it out, and that makes it worse, or better, or whatever the word is for the thing where you already know and you do it anyway.

Her shoes hit the carpet. Both of them, one after the other, soft thuds in the empty hall.

Her hand comes up to my jaw. Her other hand finds my hip and pulls me in, and I go, I go easily, I go like I've been waiting to go since the moment I walked out of the ballroom, because I have.

She kisses me like she's been holding it in all night. She kisses me like the last four hours were a held breath and this is the exhale. Her mouth is certain and hungry and her thumb is at the corner of my jaw and I have one hand fisted in the front of her dress because I need something to hold.

We break apart.

Her forehead rests against mine for a second. Both of us breathing harder than the kissing strictly warranted.

"We said once," she murmurs.

"We did say that."

"We were very clear about it."

"Extremely clear."

"We made a whole plan."

"We're terrible at plans."

She laughs. Actually laughs, the real one, low and surprised, and it goes straight through me, and she pulls back just far enough to look at me, and her face is open in a way I've only seen a handful of times.

Then she reaches into the small bag on her shoulder.

She takes out a keycard.

She looks at it, then at me, then at the door beside us. Her door. Four doors down from mine, exactly where it's always been, the room she checked into yesterday afternoon like a woman with a plan.

She steps to the door. Slides the card. The lock clicks green.

She pushes the door open with one hand and stands there, in the doorway, looking at me over her shoulder.

She doesn't say anything.

She doesn't have to.

I know what she's doing. She's giving me the choice. She's standing in a doorway with the light from the room behind her, and she's not going to ask, and she's not going to tell me to come in, and she's not going to tell me to go back either, and the whole thing is on me, the whole decision, everything that happens after this is mine to choose.

Last night I could have blamed it on something.

The whiskey. The hour. The way the bar light caught her mouth. The wedding, the nerves, the strange suspended unreality of a hotel the night before your mother marries a man you've known for three weeks. There were a hundred things I could have pointed at, and I pointed at all of them, and I slept anyway.

Tonight there's nothing.

I'm sober. It's not even midnight. My mother is happy downstairs. My father is here. The wedding is over and the marriage is real and this woman standing in the doorway is my stepsister, legally, as of four o'clock this afternoon, and she's looking at me like I'm the only thing in the hallway.

There is nothing to blame.

I know exactly what I'm doing.

I walk past her into the room.

Behind me, the door closes.