My sister walked into my wedding wearing white.
Not cream. Not champagne. Not “almost beige if the lighting is soft.”
White.
The kind of white that made conversations in the church lobby stop almost instantly.
And the worst part?
I smiled.
Because the dress she was wearing was the exact dress I had left for her.
Paige stood at the back of the chapel as if she were waiting for applause. Her hair was curled over one shoulder, her lips painted the same soft rose shade I had worn since college, and the silk dress hugged her figure as though it had been made specifically for her.
In a way, it had.
My aunt gasped loudly enough for people sitting three pews away to hear. My cousin covered her mouth in disbelief. Brooke, my maid of honor, immediately turned toward me, panic written all over her face.
“Clara,” she whispered, “do you want me to handle this?”
I kept my eyes on Paige.
“No,” I said quietly. “Let her come in.”
Brooke stared at me as though I had completely lost my mind.
Maybe I had.
For twenty-nine years, Paige had treated life like a stage and me like the background curtain.
When I graduated from high school, she announced that she had gotten engaged.
When I bought my first house, she posted photographs of herself crying beside her broken-down car and told everyone I had “abandoned the family.”
And when Ethan proposed to me, she laughed and said, “Enjoy it while he still thinks you’re the special one.”
I used to fight back.
I used to defend myself, argue with her, explain myself, and try desperately to make her understand that I wasn’t competing with her.
Eventually, I got tired.
My mother used to tell me, “Some people steal light because they don’t know how to make their own.”
But my mother wasn’t there that day.
There was only an empty chair in the front row, with her blue scarf folded neatly across it.
She had died eight months before my wedding.
And Paige hadn’t cried at the funeral.
Not where anyone could see.
The week after Mom died, Paige stopped answering my calls. She missed the dress fitting. She skipped the bridal shower. She told relatives that I was “too busy being perfect” to notice that she was grieving too.
