My husband asked me to let my sister be his “wife” for one night. He said it like he was asking me to pass the salt.

Carissa had not married Damen because he was extraordinary. She had married him because at twenty-six, he had seemed easy in all the places her life was hard. He was handsome in a loose, careless way that photographs well. He made waiters laugh. He could talk to strangers at bars and somehow leave them feeling charmed instead of handled. When they met, she had been a first-year associate living on caffeine and anxiety, billing hours in a sterile office where every man over forty seemed to smell faintly of ambition and leather. Damen had felt like sunlight then. Not serious enough to compete with her seriousness. Not polished enough to make her feel watched.

He liked that she was smart, he said.

He liked that she “had her life together.”

He liked that she could order wine without staring at the menu like a test.

At first, his admiration had felt like rest.

Later, it began to feel like resentment in a nicer shirt.