Chapter 1

"To the best brother a girl could ever have."

Chloe held her glass with both hands. Her eyes shone as she looked at my husband.

"No matter who enters your life, or how much things change... I know we will always be the only ones who truly understand each other. We are forever family."

The room burst into applause.

Daniel’s mother wiped her eyes. His father raised his whiskey glass. Several relatives smiled at Chloe as if she had just given the most touching speech of the night.

Daniel walked over and pulled her into his arms.

Chloe pressed her face against his chest.

I stood a few feet away, holding the laptop that contained the birthday video I had spent weeks making.

No one looked at me.

I had spent weeks making it and three months planning the party, right down to Daniel’s favorite cake and forty photographs along the staircase for forty years of his life.

But it took his "little sister" exactly three seconds to make me look like an absolute outsider.

On the wall behind her, a beautifully edited video continued to play.

There was Christmas, the beach, Daniel laughing over a birthday cake.

I knew exactly where I had been in each original frame—beside him, across from him, or behind the phone taking the picture.

But in Chloe’s video, I did not exist.

She had cropped me out every time.

Brother and sister at Christmas.

Brother and sister at the beach.

Brother and sister celebrating his birthday.

She had turned eight years of my marriage into a collection of memories about Daniel and his little sister.

Chloe was not Daniel’s biological sister.

His parents had fostered her when she was thirteen. They had never legally adopted her, but the entire family treated her as their youngest daughter.

Daniel called her his little sister.

At thirty-four, Chloe still used that title whenever she needed him.

She called him when she was frightened, lonely, sick, or upset. She held his arm at family gatherings and rested her head on his shoulder when she cried.

Whenever I asked Daniel for boundaries, he gave me the same answer.

"She’s my sister. Don’t make it weird."

Then our wedding photo appeared.

My lungs stopped working for a moment.

It was our wedding day.

In the original picture, I wore my white dress and held Daniel’s hand.

In Chloe’s version on the screen, I was erased.

There was only Daniel in his groom's suit and Chloe smiling sweetly in her bridesmaid dress.

The twelve-minute video ended to another round of applause. Daniel’s mother called it beautiful. Someone asked Chloe to send it to the family group chat.

My video was supposed to play next.

I closed the laptop and slid it into its case.

"Emma?" Daniel’s mother glanced at me. "Weren’t you showing something too?"

"Not anymore."

I carried the laptop into the kitchen.

The last guest left shortly after midnight.

I was placing empty glasses beside the sink when Daniel walked in. He loosened his tie, looking tired but satisfied.

"That was a great party," he said. "Thank you."

I placed another glass beside the sink.

"Chloe cropped me out of every photo."

"It was a video about us growing up."Daniel pulled off his tie and dropped it on the counter. "She was making a video for her brother. "

"She is a thirty-four-year-old woman. She knows what it means to remove a wife from her own wedding photo."

He dropped his tie on the counter. "She was trying to do something kind for me. Why are you turning this into another issue about Chloe?"

"Because she took photographs from my phone, erased your wife from them, and showed them to our entire family.

His mouth tightened. He was already treating the conversation as something to endure.

"Why are you always so insanely jealous of a video?"

Jealous.

That was the point.

I stared at him.

Chloe had erased me in front of an entire room.

Daniel had watched it happen.

Yet the only thing that offended him was that I had noticed.

That was the power of being his little sister.

Chloe could cross the line, and Daniel would move the line for her.

She could take my photographs, my memories, and even my place beside him on our wedding day.

If I objected, the problem was never what she had done.

The problem was my jealousy.

The doorbell rang.

It was almost one in the morning.

Daniel walked past me and opened the front door.

Chloe stood beneath the porch light with two large suitcases. Rain covered her coat, and her eyes were red.

"My apartment flooded," she said softly. "I didn’t know where else to go."

Daniel reached for her suitcase without looking at me.

Chloe stepped across our threshold and curled her fingers around his arm.

Then she looked at me.

"I knew my brother would always have room for me."