toward Ava. “Tell me one thing.”
Ava wiped her cheek. “Anything.”
“Did you know the wedding was paid from my account?”
Ava shook her head quickly. “No. Mom said she refinanced the townhouse and used Dad’s old insurance money.”
“There was no insurance money,” Nora said.
“I know that now.”
Lorraine made a disgusted sound. “Do not let her poison you against me on the night before your wedding.”
Ava looked down at her silk dress, at the careful lace and tiny covered buttons. Her shoulders rose and fell once.
Then she reached up and began pulling the pearl pins out of her hair.
One by one.
They clicked into her palm.
“What are you doing?” Lorraine asked.
Ava’s voice trembled. “Ending the performance.”
“You are hysterical.”
“No,” Ava said. “I think I have been hysterical for a year. I just called it planning.”
Lorraine stepped toward her, but security shifted closer.
Ava looked at Dr. Brooks. “Do the MRI. Do the surgery. Do whatever she needs. I’ll sell the dress. Cancel the tent. Keep every deposit you can get back. I don’t care.”
Lorraine went pale with rage. “Mason’s family will be humiliated.”
Ava turned slowly. “Then Mason can decide whether he wants a wife who saves face or a wife who saves her sister.”
Nora closed her eyes as they wheeled her toward imaging.
She did not know if Ava meant it. She did not know if Mason would leave, if Lorraine would lie, if the bills would bury her, if her right foot would ever wake fully again.
But for the first time in months, the truth had witnesses.
The MRI was a tunnel of thunder.
Nora lay flat inside the machine while noise hammered around her. Her back screamed despite the medication. She tried not to think about the cancellation form. Tried not to imagine Lorraine practicing Nora’s signature at a kitchen table, calm as a woman writing a grocery list.
When the scan ended, two nurses helped move her back to the stretcher. Ava was waiting in the hallway.
She had changed into hospital scrubs, her rehearsal dress folded in a plastic garment bag at her feet. Without the pearls and silk, she looked younger. Frightened. Real.
“Where’s Mom?” Nora asked.
“Security made her leave the treatment area. She called Mason’s mother from the parking lot and told her you had a breakdown.”
Nora was too tired to be surprised.
Ava sat beside the stretcher. “I called Mason first.”
“And?”
“He asked why I didn’t know my own sister was sick.”
The question sat between them.
Ava twisted her bare ring finger, though the ring was still there. “I didn’t have an answer.”
“You never asked.”
Ava flinched.
Nora expected excuses. Ava had always been good at them. Mom needed me. The wedding was stressful. You said you were fine. You don’t like talking about yourself.
Instead, Ava nodded.
“I didn’t ask,” she said. “Because if I asked, I might have to give something up.”
Nora looked away.
That was the first honest thing Ava had said in years.
Dr. Patel arrived with Dr. Brooks. She was small, composed, with silver at her temples and the steady voice Nora remembered from the clinic.
“We found the compression,” Dr. Patel said. “It is significant. But you
