The Sister Who Never Was

1 Ever since I was little, my mother, Brenda, drilled one rule into my head: There is a right age for everything. When I was a little girl, I lived to dance. I’d twirl in the living room until I was dizzy. But when my mother found out I was secretly auditioning for a junior conservatory, she backhanded me so hard I tumbled down the wooden staircase. “What does a student need to do besides study?!” she had screamed, looming over me as I clutched my agonizingly swollen ankle. “If your sister were here, she would never waste her time on such useless garbage!” That fall left me with a permanent limp. My ballet dreams were shattered right there on the hardwood floor. From then on, I stayed up until dawn, burning my retinas on textbooks. Years later, in college, I was offered a fully funded Ph.D. track in neuroscience. I wanted to bury myself in research. Instead, my mother showed up at my dorm, threatening to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills if I didn’t drop out and start going on the blind dates she’d arranged. “What’s the point of a girl reading so many books? A degree won’t keep you warm at night,” she had sneered, holding the plastic amber bottle hostage. “If your sister were here, she’d already be giving me a grandson!” I folded. I gave up the bright, tangible future I held in my hands and chose the path of least resistance. I got married. Then came the birth of my baby. The moment I brought my daughter home from the hospital, my mother snatched her from my arms, declaring that the baby would be registered and raised in my dead sister’s name. “Your daughter was born on the exact same day as your sister. It’s a sign from God,” my mother said, her eyes gleaming with a frantic kind of logic. “Besides, a woman your age should be focusing on her husband. You just need to bounce back and give him a son next!” My eyes burned with tears. I looked to my husband, Arthur, pleading silently. He just stood by the bassinet, averting his gaze, entirely mute. I was drowning in despair. But then, later that evening, I walked past the cracked nursery door and overheard them. The voices were hushed, conspiratorial. “Don’t worry,” my mother was whispering to Arthur. “Harper is my only daughter. Sarah isn’t real. I just made her up. Harper has always been too ambitious, too stubborn. If I didn’t give her a perfect ghost to compete with, her life would have completely derailed by now!” Arthur’s voice was low, practical. “As long as you take this girl, Harper will refocus. She’s still young enough to give me a boy. The Prescott family needs an heir, Brenda.” I stood frozen in the hallway, the blood draining from my face. My whole body felt like it had been plunged into an ice bath. I looked toward the bathroom down the hall, thinking of the white pain pills hidden deep in the medicine cabinet. A slow, hysterical smile stretched across my face. If this fictional sister had thrown herself off a roof at age twenty-five… then, being the exact same age, I suppose I ought to do the right thing at the right time. … My lower abdomen still cramped with a dull, vicious ache from the delivery. When Lily’s piercing, breathless cries echoed from the living room, instinct took over. I gritted my teeth against the pain and pushed myself off the bed to go nurse her. But my mother blocked the doorway, looking at me like I was an intruder. “That is your sister’s child now. What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped. “Are you really going to compete with a dead woman?” Arthur stood just behind her. A flicker of pity crossed his eyes before he pressed his lips together and fell in line. “She’s right, Harper. Just rest,” he said smoothly. “Brenda is mourning. She’ll take excellent care of little Lily. Let her have this.” Lily’s crying grew louder, crashing over me in frantic waves. My heart felt like it was being run through a meat grinder. Watching the two of them—my husband and my mother—standing there acting out this grotesque play, a blinding rage finally ignited in my chest. “My sister?” I choked out, stepping forward. “Where is she, then? Lily is screaming for her mother, how can you just—” I didn’t get to finish. My mother lunged, her hands slamming into my shoulders with terrifying force. I stumbled backward, crashing hard into the narrow console table in the hallway—the table that served as my sister’s memorial. “Shut your mouth!” my mother shrieked. “Your sister is right here! You’ve prayed to her for twenty-three years, don’t you dare act like you don’t know!” She hovered over me, her chest heaving. “If she hadn’t died, do you think I ever would have had you? You’ve been nothing but a burden your whole life!” Gasping through the sharp pain radiating from my spine, I looked up. Really looked. I stared dead at the framed photograph sitting next to the flickering memorial candle. In the flickering light, studying the features of this ‘perfect’ young woman, it finally hit me. She looked absolutely nothing like my mother. Not a single shared feature. A bitter realization saturated my chest, expanding until it felt like my ribs would crack. Twenty-three years. For twenty-three entire years, my mother had kept me spinning in circles with the most pathetic, sloppy lie. Whenever I did something that strayed from her master plan—whenever I showed a spark of independence—she would launch into a full-blown theatric breakdown. Weeping, screaming, threatening to end it all. And her ultimate weapon was always the same: forcing me to kneel in front of that photograph and beg for forgiveness for being such a disappointment. Growing up, I felt sorry for her. A single mother who had lost her golden child, raising me all on her own. Because of that guilt, I compromised. Again and again and again. Even when my depression got so bad that I was surviving on heavy prescriptions I hid in my underwear drawer, I never breathed a word of it to her. “Brenda… she just gave birth… don’t…” Arthur took a half-step toward me, reaching out. But his feet seemed poured in concrete. He stopped, leaving his hand suspended in the air. A year ago, I met Arthur through a country club setup my mother engineered. He was polite, polished, and attentive—everything I thought I wanted. Shortly after our wedding, in a moment of vulnerability, I had poured my heart out to him. I told him about the suffocating agony of living my entire life in the shadow of a dead prodigy. Arthur had pulled me into his arms, kissing the top of my head. “I’ve got you now, Harper,” he had murmured, his voice a warm blanket. “With me, you can be exactly who you are. We’ll have one child, and that’s it. No sisters to compete with. Just one kid who gets all our love.” I had cried into his chest that night. I thought I had found my safe harbor. And now, here he was. The warden’s favorite guard. “Stop using my sister to control me!” I screamed. Lily’s hoarse wailing gave me a surge of adrenaline I didn’t know I possessed. I shoved my mother aside with tremendous force, scrambling toward the living room to get my daughter. “Sister? I don’t even have a sister!” The air in the room vanished. My mother and Arthur locked eyes, naked panic flashing between them. Before I could take another step, Arthur grabbed me around the waist. At the same time, my mother darted into the living room, scooped Lily up from the bassinet, and bolted for the front door. “You’re postpartum. Your hormones are making you unstable. You’re in no state to care for a newborn,” Arthur said, his voice dropping into that calm, authoritative tone that made me sick. “If your sister were here, she would never speak to her mother that way!” Brenda yelled over her shoulder as the heavy oak door slammed shut behind her. Arthur’s arms were like iron bands around my waist, pressing dangerously tight against my still-tender abdomen. It felt like a pair of massive hands were physically twisting my organs. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead, dripping into my eyes. I stared at the closed door, thrashing against Arthur’s grip, but it was completely useless. He didn’t let go until the sound of my mother’s car engine faded down the driveway. When he finally released me, my knees gave out. I hit the hardwood with a heavy thud. Arthur immediately dropped down beside me, pulling me into a tight embrace. He began stroking my spine, inch by inch, gentle and rhythmic, just like he always did when I had a panic attack. We stayed like that for a long time. When my breathing finally leveled out, he let out a long, heavy sigh. “Sweetheart. Are you feeling better?” he murmured against my hair. “When you’re calm, we’ll figure out a way for you to apologize to your mother, okay?” I turned my head slowly, staring at him in sheer, unadulterated disbelief. “You knew…” I whispered. “Harper.” Arthur was perfectly composed now. The brief panic from earlier was entirely gone. “Sarah is gone. What are you even fighting for? The baby is just… it gives Brenda something to live for.” His gaze drifted down, lingering on my stomach, which was finally starting to flatten. “We are in the prime of our lives. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a baby of our own? A boy. I can more than provide for us, Harper…” It was the same coaxing, reasonable tone he always used to get his way. But this time, it chilled me to the bone. I clawed the words out of my throat. “What do you think I am? What is Lily to you? Property?” “Don’t be dramatic.” Arthur’s brow furrowed, a flash of annoyance breaking through his polished veneer. “You’re a married woman now. If you aren’t focused on your husband and having a family, what exactly do you plan to do with your life?” He offered a condescending half-smile, his eyes briefly flicking down to my bad leg. “Go back to school? Take up ballet again? Harper. Stop acting crazy. Just do what you’re supposed to do.” What you’re supposed to do. I’d heard those exact words from my mother so many times they were practically branded into my brain. To hear them fall from Arthur’s mouth felt like a final, fatal blow. My hands clenched into fists, my fingernails biting hard into my palms. The old, faded red scars on my wrists began to itch fiercely, and I couldn’t stop myself from scratching at them. “No,” I muttered, shaking my head. “I’m not having another baby. You promised me. Just Lily. I have to raise her…” I had endured too much. I would die before I let Lily inherit my nightmare. Arthur’s eyes darkened, the affable mask slipping away completely. His mouth pulled into a hard, unforgiving line. “Harper, if you aren’t going to give me children, why the hell did I marry you? Your mother warned me you were difficult. I’ve been incredibly patient with you, and this is the thanks I get?” He stepped closer, towering over me. “Knowing how stubborn you are, if you kept Lily, you’d make sure she was an only child. Did you really think I’d let the Prescott name die out?” He scoffed, a short, ugly sound. “And drop the depressed-victim act. The only reason your mother had to invent a dead saint to hold over your head is because you refused to fall in line!” Act. My lips twitched into a broken smile as I met his gaze. He had finally dropped the disguise. That look in his eyes—the cold, calculating entitlement—was the exact same look I’d seen in my mother’s eyes for twenty-three years. One wanted a docile little doll to validate her life choices. The other wanted an incubator to stroke his ego. Neither of them had ever wanted me. “Okay,” I said. I slowly wiped the tears from my cheeks, my face going entirely numb. I nodded. Arthur let out a visible breath of relief. “Good. See? I’m not like your mother. I’ll make sure Lily is taken care of. And when we have our own kid, I’ll treat them exactly the same.” He quickly pulled out his phone and called my mother back to the house. “Lily is with my old friend from church. Harper, you are my flesh and blood, do you really think I’d hurt you?” Perhaps because I had finally shown my teeth, my mother’s tone was softer than usual when she returned. “Neither me nor your sister ever got to live this kind of upper-class life. Now you’re living it, and you’re acting like a brat.” She sat next to me on the sofa, patting my knee. “A woman your age needs to secure her place with a son. Think about how jealous the ladies at the country club will be when I’m pushing a grandson in a stroller!” She smiled, a dreamy, vacant look in her eyes. “It’ll bring your sister peace, too.” Even now, just mentioning the sister made her voice drop into a reverent whisper. Her performance was flawless. In her telling, Sarah was a rule-follower. A straight-A student. The golden girl of the neighborhood. She took a safe corporate job, married her high school sweetheart right after graduation, and tragically died in a car crash during the best years of her life. Even though I now knew she was a phantom, the way my mother’s eyes sparkled when she talked about her was something I had never, ever received. I had spent my whole life ducking my head in shame, praying that one day, my mother would look at me with that same glowing pride. That was why, when my ballet dreams and my academic dreams were systematically crushed, I swallowed the grief and said nothing. But today, sitting in this impeccably decorated living room, I realized it was a black hole. Nothing I did would ever fill it. My mother slid a steaming mug across the coffee table. The smell of the herbal fertility concoction—some holistic brew she paid hundreds of dollars for—made my stomach churn. “I had a specialist custom-make this. It works miracles. It guarantees the next one is a boy,” she whispered conspiratorially. She leaned in. “Men like Arthur don’t grow on trees, Harper. You need to lock this down.” Across the room, Arthur watched me, his gaze heavy and expectant. Wave after wave of nausea hit me. But I picked up the mug. I didn’t flinch. I drank it in one long swallow. My mother and Arthur exchanged a deeply satisfied smile. For the next few weeks, Arthur played the role of the perfect husband again, though his hands were on me every night. He never mentioned Lily. My mother practically moved in. She shadowed me, standing over me while I choked down bowl after bowl of that foul, earthy brew. I drank it until my tongue went numb and I couldn’t taste the bitterness anymore. And then, an unexpected guest arrived. “Well, Brenda, your daughter has a baby and you don’t even call your oldest friends?” My mother’s face instantly darkened. She moved to block the door, but Martha pushed her way inside. Martha swept her gaze around the house, looking for the baby. “I heard it was a little girl. Where is the sweetheart?” I looked at my mother’s twisted, panicked face. The blood drained from my fingertips. I stumbled backward, gripping the edge of the kitchen island to keep from falling. It suddenly all made sense. Martha was the real-life Sarah. Martha and my mother had grown up together. But Martha played by the rules. She married young, had kids, bought a house in the suburbs, and now had a gaggle of grandkids and a very comfortable retirement. She was the quintessential American success story that our parents’ generation worshipped. My mother, on the other hand, was always smarter than Martha. But she hated playing by the rules. She tried launching startups in the 90s and failed spectacularly, losing everything. She spent her best years bitter and broke, eventually marrying a deadbeat—my father—who left her shortly after I was born. She needed me to have the perfect, traditional life so she could finally prove that her life hadn’t been a complete waste. Failing to find the baby, Martha’s eyes landed on the memorial shelf. She looked at the photograph of the fake sister, then looked at me with deep, agonizing pity. “You’re really still worshipping that…” “Enough, Martha!” my mother barked, her voice shrill. “If my oldest daughter were still alive, my life would be ten times better than yours!” Trembling with rage, my mother grabbed my arm—her nails digging into my skin—and dragged me in front of Martha. “My youngest is incredible, too. Ivy League educated, married a wealthy man, and guess what? She’s pregnant again right now.” My mother smiled wildly. “The doctor says it’s a boy! He’s going to carry on the Prescott legacy!” I hissed in pain, but under my mother’s desperate, pleading glare, muscle memory took over. I seamlessly slipped into the role of the sister who never existed. With crushing despair, I realized I was no longer Harper Gallagher, the vibrant little girl who just wanted to dance. Even with Martha staring at me in horrified confusion, I kept my voice soft and even, playing the gracious, obedient daughter. I wasn’t the Harper who wanted to cure diseases and change the world, either. When Arthur walked into the room and joined the conversation, I found myself instinctively shrinking myself, letting my degree serve as nothing more than a shiny accessory to complement his status. I even placed a hand on my flat stomach, corroborating my mother’s lie about a phantom son. I used to have a spine. When I was a teenager, even with a bad leg, I had grit my teeth and danced in the school talent show just to spite her. My reward was my mother taking a belt to my bad leg when we got home. When I tried to choose my own major, she tracked me down on the rooftop of my dorm building and ripped my acceptance letters to shreds, letting them scatter into the wind. “You’re at the perfect age to find a husband. What’s the point of this? If you miss your window, you’ll end up alone with your books!” The memories crashed into my skull so hard I thought my brain would hemorrhage. My wrists throbbed. I felt like I was hallucinating. I watched the golden girl from the photograph step out of her frame and slowly walk toward me. She walked right into my chest, merging with me. “Is that so?” Martha huffed a cold laugh. She looked at me, her voice softening with profound sadness. “Brenda, look at your daughter. She’s pale as a sheet. Let the poor girl rest.” Martha paused, looking around the living room again. “Where is the baby, anyway? What kind of mother separates a newborn from its mother right after birth? What is wrong with you two?” The baby? I frowned. Whose baby? My mother and Arthur panicked, loudly talking over each other to change the subject. Then, my mother’s cell phone rang. “Brenda!” A panicked voice blared through the speaker before she could turn down the volume. “You need to get down here! Your granddaughter is burning up, she won’t stop crying!” My mother instinctively shot a terrified glance at me. The sound of that baby’s cry over the phone was like a glass shattering in my mind, breaking the spell I was under. My mother practically dove into the corner of the room, hunching over to whisper furiously into the receiver. Martha grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door. “What kind of mother are you?!” Martha yelled at me. “Your baby is sick! She’s probably got a terrible fever, and you’re just standing here?!” “Stop!” My mother threw her phone down and physically threw herself between us and the front door. “No! She can’t go! If she goes… all of this is for nothing!” “Brenda, have you lost your damn mind?!” Martha stared at her like she was a monster. “She is that baby’s mother! You’re keeping her from her sick child? Are you completely insane?!” Mother. Boom. The word detonated in my head. I finally remembered. I have a daughter. Her name is Lily. I grabbed my coat from the rack and lunged for the door. My mother shrieked, grabbing my arm and twisting it violently. “You stay right here! I’ll go! The baby is fine. She’s not your baby anyway, she belongs to your sister!” I remembered everything. The dam broke. Twenty-three years of suffocating rage and grief erupted from my chest. “Are we still doing this?!” I screamed, my voice tearing my throat. “She is my child! You never even had another daughter!” I grabbed the framed photograph off the memorial shelf and slammed it onto the hardwood floor. Glass exploded everywhere. “A stock photo of a stranger you found online! And you’ve worshipped it for twenty-three years!” My mother’s eyes went completely black. She swung her arm and slapped me across the face with everything she had. Off-balance, I collapsed, my hands landing squarely in the shards of broken glass. Blood immediately pooled on the floor, bright red against the dark wood. But my mother didn’t even look at my bleeding hands. She dropped to her knees, frantically gathering the torn pieces of the photograph and pressing them to her chest, rocking back and forth as if she were holding a dying child. Ignoring the glass embedded in my palms, I staggered to my feet and tried to follow Martha out the door. I didn’t know where the strength came from, but I ripped myself away when my mother tried to grab my ankle. “Arthur! What the hell are you doing, just standing there?!” my mother screamed. Arthur looked at me, his eyes flickering with indecision. He looked at the blood dripping from my hands. “Brenda, maybe we should just let Harper go see…” “Are you an idiot?!” my mother roared, her face twisted into something demonic. “I’m telling you, if she sees that baby, she will never let her go!” She pointed a bloody finger at him. “Twenty-five is the biological peak for a woman! If she misses this window, she’ll never give you a healthy boy! We spent months breaking her down to get her compliant. Are you going to throw it all away now?!” Instantly, the hesitation vanished from Arthur’s eyes. He stepped in front of me, grabbed me by the waist, and forcefully dragged me down the hallway toward the master bedroom. “Relax, Harper. Lily will be fine. She’s your sister’s kid, remember? We’ll handle it,” he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Are you two psychopaths?!” Martha screamed, rushing forward to help me. My mother blocked her, physically shoving the older woman out the front door. “Get out! You just can’t stand to see me finally win, Martha!” my mother screamed onto the porch. “I spent my whole life losing to you because I didn’t follow the timeline! You got everything because you played by the rules. Well, my daughter is not going to make my mistakes!” She slammed the heavy oak door and threw the deadbolt. In the hallway, I sank my teeth into Arthur’s forearm as hard as I could. He cursed, violently shoving me backward. I tumbled into the bedroom. Before I could get up, he stepped out, slammed the door, and locked it from the outside. A second later, the heavy thunk of the circuit breaker echoed through the walls. The lights went dead. The room was plunged into absolute, pitch-black darkness. “Please! Arthur, I’m begging you! Don’t leave me in the dark!” The terror hit me instantly. Arthur knew. He knew that because of my trauma, I was morbidly terrified of the dark. I couldn’t even sleep without a bedside lamp on. I threw myself at the door, hammering my bloody fists against the wood like a wild animal. “Just calm down and think about what you’ve done! Brenda and I are going to the clinic!” his voice drifted back, muffled and cold, before the front door opened and shut. The silence that followed was suffocating. The darkness wrapped around my throat like a physical hand. I clawed at my arms, leaving long, bloody scratches on my own skin, trying to ground myself. I don’t know how many hours passed. By the time the sun began to rise, I was curled into a tight ball on the floor, my hair matted with sweat and tears, barely breathing. Then, I heard the front door open. Footsteps in the hall. Hushed voices. They were quiet, but in the dead silence of the house, every syllable hit me like a hammer to the skull. “How the hell are we going to tell Harper? The baby… Brenda, the baby is dead.” “Keep your voice down! We don’t tell her. Not yet. You just need to work harder. Once you get her pregnant again, she’ll forget all about it…” Snap. The last remaining thread of my sanity severed clean in half. My mother had taken the last pure thing in my life and destroyed it. The image of that stock-photo girl flashed in my mind. How did she die again? Oh. Right. She jumped off a roof. Perfect. I am twenty-five. The exact same age. A quiet, airy laugh escaped my lips. I pushed myself off the floor, climbed onto the window seat, unlatched the heavy glass, and swung my legs over the sill. I was finally going to do exactly what my mother wanted. “Harper? Are you awake?” The bedroom door clicked unlocked and swung open. The morning light poured in, catching my mother’s face just in time for her to see me let go. All the color drained from her face as I fell backward into the sky.

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