Even Emma is different. She’s still somber, but she’s no longer as clingy. She doesn’t even ask to nurse in the daytime anymore, only at night before she goes to bed, which Julia is absolutely fine with. In fact, Julia loves that she still gets to cradle her little girl at night and feel her warm little body smushed up against her own. But other than that, Emma has stopped wrapping her limbs around Julia and clinging to her like a little baby koala all the time, and it has been incredibly freeing for the two of them.
Julia’s income from the shoots is still not enough to cover the mortgage payment; it’s more than likely that Julia will have to downsize at some point. She doesn’t mind. The house is nothing but a reminder of the life she had under Marshall’s thumb. The thought of moving overwhelms her, though, and so she’s still procrastinating over putting the house up for sale and looking for a smaller place to move to.
This afternoon, as Vera takes Emma to the park and Julia edits the photos from her last shoot at the dining table, she thinks she hears a noise from the back of the house.
Probably the wind, she thinks, and goes back to playing around with the exposure of the photo. But no, there’s a clatter and a creak. The hairs on her arms stand on end, her ears pricking up. Someone’s inside the house. Her throat goes painfully dry and her palms are somehow sweaty already, and she hasn’t even gotten up from her seat yet. Julia stands slowly, careful not to push her chair back so it won’t scrape against the wood floor. She casts about the dining room for anything that might serve as a weapon and picks up a decorative vase from a side table. Breathing unsteadily, Julia steps out of the dining room and down the hallway.
The hallway has never seemed so dark and so ominous before now. Julia feels light-headed, like she might faint, but somehow, she continues stepping forward, gripping the vase with her sweaty palms. One of the floorboards creaks and she freezes, her breath caught in her throat. From the master bedroom, she thinks she can hear the sound of someone freezing as well, if such a thing could make a sound. Or rather, the absence of sound, like a breath being held, and eyes opened wide with expectation and fear.
The tension builds until it overwhelms her and her instincts make a snap decision, propelling her forward. She charges down the rest of the hallway, the vase raised, ready for battle, and explodes into the master bedroom with ferocious strength.
There’s nobody there. A shocked laugh coughs out of her mouth and she sags against the wall, her chest still thumping, the rest of her body shivery with adrenaline. Of course there’s no one here. What is wrong with her? She releases her breath and plops down at the foot of the bed, focusing on restoring her breath. It will make for a very funny dinner story, at least.
Then she notices that the window is wide open, and her self-effacing laughter catches in her throat. Vera has taken over the master bedroom for weeks now, and Vera likes leaving the window open just a crack, enough to have some air circulation, but not so much that she can hear the neighbor’s terrier yipping at squirrels. But now the window is fully open, the sheer curtains billowing from a breeze that chills Julia to her bones. Wrapping her arms around her body, Julia strides to the window and slams it shut. Vera must have opened it this morning, Julia tells herself. That’s the likeliest explanation. She forces herself to take a deep breath and release it. Everything is fine. Everything is—
Her gaze falls on a stack of papers in the middle of the bed. Frowning, Julia walks to the bed and picks up the papers. On the first page are the words:
UNTITLED MANUSCRIPT
Oliver R. Chen
Whoa, okay. So she has in her hands Oliver’s manuscript. She remembers now how, back in high school, Oliver was always scribbling in his notebook. On the weekends, they often took the tram around SF and got out at random stops. Oliver would find a bench to sit on and write while Julia roamed about taking photos, and then they’d hop on the tram again until the next stop. He never showed her what he was writing, promising that he’d show her when he was done. But then she started dating Marshall, and the idyllic weekends with Oliver stopped completely, and after a while, Julia forgot about Oliver’s notebook.
She should probably respect Oliver’s privacy and put this back on the bed. But even as Julia thinks this, curiosity overwhelms her. She’s so happy to know that all these years later, Oliver is still writing. A peek wouldn’t hurt, would it? She sits down in an armchair and flips to the first page.
David never asked to be Randall’s younger brother. A twin, no less. Few things in life are as cursed as being the inferior twin. Even when they were little, it was obvious that David was the poor man’s version, the knockoff of Randall. Where Randall was active and boisterous in that charming way that kids often are, David was so shy he found it hard to even say hi to people. Their parents were always apologizing on David’s behalf. “Sorry, he’s shy.” “Sorry, he doesn’t like strangers.” Meanwhile, Randall would give his trademark gap-toothed grin and everyone would go, “Aww,” and forget David’s existence. Which was how he liked it, anyway.
Until he met Aurelia. He fell in love with her at first sight. How could he not? Never before had he come across anyone like her.
Julia feels the floor falling away from her. What the hell? What the—
Everything from her past comes flooding back to her mind. How close she’d been to Oliver, how he had been her best friend for so long. How she would often see him looking at her in a way that made her stomach feel funny. How the hell did she not realize that Oliver had feelings for her? In hindsight, she realizes nothing could’ve been more obvious.
Her mind goes forward, to how Oliver simply stopped being her friend when she started dating Marshall. Was it because he was mad at her? For not returning his feelings? Anger surges through her. How was she supposed to guess that he was in love with her? He never showed it, never tried making a move or anything. Over time she’d started seeing him as almost a brother, and to now find out that he’d been harboring these feelings for her all this time is a bit of a betrayal. And to abandon her as a friend just like that, no explanations given, like this whole time, their friendship was merely him trying to get into her pants and then giving up when he realized that his brother had gotten there first.
Marshall had always known, of course. He’d made all these snide remarks about how Oliver was her pathetic little servant. But she’d dismissed all these comments as harmless brotherly jokes. God, she was so stupid. By the time she realized that nothing about Marshall was harmless, it had been too late. She’d been broken by then, her internal compass whirring madly, unable to tell what was right and wrong. All of it, in the end, had been decided by Marshall. Who was stupid, who was worthless, who was worth their time.
She flips through the next few pages, skimming the words with increasing horror.
How much he loves her, everything about her . . .
But of course, because David is cursed, because David is the lesser catch, all she has eyes for is Randall . . .