Sienna always knew everything. It was
her curse
and her armour. She moved through the world cataloguing information the way other people breathed —
automatically, constantly, without conscious effort
—
And the catalogue included things like the way
Melissa’s robe
always smelled like
Phei’s cologne
in the morning, and the way there was only one bed being used in the master suite where Melissa claimed to be sleeping with Phei, and the way Phei’s hand found Melissa’s waist with the muscle memory of a man
who’d
been finding it in the
dark
for weeks.
Sienna knew. And she was silent about it. And Delilah couldn’t tell if the silence was acceptance or a bomb with a very long fuse.
She paused at the living room threshold, glancing back once.
Phei had already turned Melissa around. One hand fisted in her hair, tilting her head back. The other
slid between her thighs
beneath the robe, fingers disappearing into her mother’s wet pussy.
Melissa gasped — soft, needy — hips rocking forward onto his hand while her own fingers dug into his shoulders.
Delilah watched for one heartbeat too long.
Then she turned away, cheeks burning, thighs clenching, cursing under her breath as she walked into the living room.
"Fuck my life."
Delilah sank onto the huge sectional in the living room, pulling her knees to her chest like she could fold herself small enough to disappear from the weight of everything pressing down.
The cool obsidian tiles kissed her bare feet, grounding her just enough to keep her from floating away entirely.
Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the city skyline glittered below — clean, innocent, sparkling like a place where fathers didn’t murder infant daughters and replace them with changeling boys while their mothers smiled and pretended the math added up.
Behind her, in the kitchen, she could hear the low murmur of Phei’s voice and Melissa’s answering laugh — soft, warm, intimate with moans she was fighting not to make.
The soft clink of utensils.
The gentle sizzle of butter in the pan.
Domestic sounds. Normal sounds. The sounds of a family that had finally found its rhythm after someone ripped the old one apart with bare hands and void-black eyes.
Delilah pretended to scroll on her phone.
In truth,
she was counting
.
Counting days since the sky tore open. Counting lies she’d swallowed without tasting. Counting impossibilities that had somehow become her reality.
How had
Harold
even managed it?
If Melissa knew she was carrying twin girls —
and she
had
to have known
; ultrasounds were routine, genders were almost always visible by the second trimester —
how could she have believed, even for a moment, that one of them had suddenly become a boy?
How could Harold have produced a male infant at the exact right time? How could the hospital staff, the doctors, the birth records — how could
everything
have
aligned
so perfectly for a swap no one noticed?
Unless...
Delilah’s throat tightened, the ache blooming sharp and sudden behind her sternum.
Unless
Mom
had noticed.
Unless she had
known
.
Unless she had chosen silence — had looked at the tiny body in her arms that she’d remained with, at the boy who wasn’t hers, and decided the
lie was kinder than the truth.
And always came home for all these years to a husband who made sure one of four daughters was gone, replaced, and she’d smiled, nodded, and let the grief stay locked behind her teeth for eighteen years.
The thought made Delilah’s stomach churn— not with anger but with something worse. The possibility that her mother, her fierce, unbreakable Melissa —
had been broken
long before any of them realised.
That the strength Delilah had always
envied
was just
scar tissue over a wound
that never closed.
She glanced back toward the kitchen.
Phei and Melissa had turned slightly, both looking at her now. Melissa’s expression was gentle, worried — the face of a woman who could read her daughter’s silences the way a sailor reads clouds before the storm hits.
Phei’s was unreadable — that calm, predatory stillness he wore when he was watching someone arrive at a conclusion he’d already reached and was quietly rooting for them to get there
without breaking
.
Delilah looked away first.
She was still hurting.
Not from the bruises
Harold
had left on her face and arms — those had faded under
Eira
’s healing touch within hours while she was sleeping
(miraculously, Phei had said)
, the crystalline fairy’s frost sealing the damaged capillaries, reducing the swelling, erasing the physical evidence as if the blows had never landed.
As if pain could be erased with a touch and a whisper.
The real pain was deeper.
The
knowledge
that the man she had called
"father"
her entire life had murdered her twin sister at birth and replaced her with a
changeling
boy.
That he had lied to her mother, to her sisters, to the entire world.
That he had built their family on
infanticide
and
deception
— and she had grown up inside the structure without ever noticing the blood in the foundations, the silent screams of her mother baked into the walls, the silence her mother carried like a second heartbeat.
And that her mother — had lived with that truth for years and never spoken it aloud.
Delilah pressed her forehead to her knees and closed her eyes.
In the kitchen, Phei’s arms tightened around Melissa’s waist. He pressed his lips to her temple, voice so low only she could hear.
"She’s still counting."
Melissa nodded, eyes glistening, the shimmer of tears she refused to let fall because falling meant admitting something had finally broken.
"She’ll ask eventually."
Phei kissed her temple again — soft, lingering, the kiss of a man who knew exactly how much weight one woman could carry before she buckled.
"When she’s ready."
He glanced toward the living room, where Delilah sat curled into herself on the massive sectional —
small
against the glass,
small
against the skyline,
small
against the weight of everything she was carrying.
His expression softened—
Melissa sighed — the sound heavy and ragged, like something long-held had finally cracked open inside her chest and was bleeding slow and steady.
She stood at the stove, spatula forgotten in her hand, staring down at the bubbling pan of cinnamon-vanilla French toast batter as though it held answers she’d been looking for in the wrong places for years.
Phei’s arms were still wrapped around her waist from behind, but even his warmth couldn’t quite reach the
cold knot
that had lived in her sternum since the day she held two girls in a scan room and came home to a husband who told her one of them was a boy — and she’d smiled, nodded, and let the grief stay locked behind her teeth because the alternative was shattering everything.
"What could I even say?"
she whispered, more to herself than to anyone else. Her voice cracked on the last word — raw, fragile, the sound of a woman who’d spent years building a perfect mask and was now watching it slip. "
I was a fool.
A complete, trusting, stupid fool
."