For a fraction of a second, the answer flashed in her eyes before she could stop it. A crescent. That’s what it was. Carissa had known it for ten years. Nikki knew it too.
The room emptied out.
Whatever softness had remained in Carissa hardened cleanly.
“Right,” she said.
“Carissa, wait—”
“No.”
Nikki reached for her arm. Carissa stepped back.
“It’s not what you think.”
“It is exactly what I think.”
Nikki’s eyes filled with tears on cue. “He said you two were basically over.”
“That’s convenient.”
“He said you were always working, always exhausted, always making him feel small.”
Carissa stared at her little sister and felt a fatigue older than either of them. “And that made you sleep with my husband?”
Nikki’s face twisted. “Why do you always say things like that? Like I’m the villain in some movie? You’ve never understood what it’s like to be me.”
Carissa laughed then—not loudly, not bitterly, just once, because the sentence was so offensively ridiculous it broke the air around it.
“No,” she said. “You’re right. I have never known what it’s like to be the person everyone rescues while pretending she’s drowning.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Name it?”