I was Sebastian Aster's girlfriend for three years.
He gave me a Beacon Hill brownstone, a black Amex, and a Tiffany pendant the color of pigeon's blood — and never once touched me.
Everyone said I was the stand-in for his ghost.
The ghost was my twin sister, Annabel Thorne.
The day she flew home from Geneva, Sebastian didn't come back to the brownstone all night.
The next morning, he slid a wire-transfer slip across his desk.
"Sloane. Annabel's home. You should go."
I smiled and took it.
Two nights later, at his and Annabel's engagement gala, I handed him my own end-stage cardiomyopathy letter.
In front of half of Boston I lifted a microphone and said:
"Mr. Aster. Thank you for taking such good care of my sister these past three years."
"I'm dying now. I'd like my heart back, please."
"Oh — I forgot to mention."
"The person you love has always been me. The one who carried you out of that fire three years ago — that was me, too."
The day Annabel landed at Logan, Sebastian was the one waiting at the gate.
The push notification hit my phone while I was sitting alone at the dining table in the Beacon Hill brownstone, a bowl of consommé going cold in front of me. The Globe's society column had it on the wire inside an hour: a long-lensed shot of Sebastian on the arrivals concourse, dark wool overcoat, jaw set, hands too gentle as he wound a cream silk twilly around my sister's neck.
Annabel was tipping her face up to laugh. She looked exactly like I had at twenty-three. Before.
Connie, the housekeeper, stood near the sideboard with the wine she'd already opened, not pouring it.
I turned the phone face-down and went on eating.
A few minutes later she crossed the rug, careful as a cat. "Miss Sloane, Mr. Aster called. He said — he said not to wait up tonight."
"Got it."
"Miss Annabel just landed, so he's probably —"
I lifted my eyes.
Connie stopped talking.
Everyone in this house knew the script. My name is Sloane Thorne. I am the younger of Bennett Thorne's twin daughters. For three years I had lived under Sebastian Aster's roof as the body double, the placeholder, the soft-voiced girl who answered to my sister's old nicknames whenever a Globe photographer came past the door.
He treated me well.
When my chest seized at four in the morning, he killed an eight-figure call with Tokyo and drove me to Mass General himself. When I said, on a flat dull Tuesday, that I missed snow, he had a Vermont landscape crew truck in fifty pallets of refrigerated powder and built me a small, perfect winter inside the Nantucket lawn. When the burn-revision surgeon needed a seventh round on the scarring along my temple and jaw, he flew the man in from Geneva and paid him in Aster Capital fund stakes.
He just never touched me.
The closest he came was the night my fever cracked 103. He drove me to Brigham himself. In the back of the car, with my fingers tangled in his tie and my mouth full of nonsense, I had asked him, "Sebastian. Do you love me?"
He had been quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Sloane. Don't try to be her."
The "her" was Annabel.
The girl he believed had carried him out of the fire.
I'd laughed and let go of his tie. I hadn't asked again.
He came home at eleven. There was a faint gardenia on his coat — not my soap. A cream silk twilly was hooked through the strap of his briefcase. I knew that twilly. I'd been wearing one exactly like it the night I'd crawled out of the warehouse with blood crusting my left eye and a man's weight across my back. Annabel had taken the original off my hospital tray three years ago, walked into Sebastian's recovery room with it folded in her lap, and cried the right kind of clean tears.
"You're still up," he said.
I closed my book. "I waited."
He frowned. "Don't, going forward."
I held his eyes. "Annabel's back. You're happy."
He didn't bother denying it. After a beat: "She's fragile right now. Try not to bother her for a while."
I laughed.
My heart had been failing for three years. My hand shook from the diuretics. Annabel had been on a nine-hour Swiss Air flight. He was already taking her side of it.
"Sloane." Lower, in warning.
I stood. "Don't worry, Mr. Aster. I know my place better than anyone."
He looked at me a long second, and the look got darker.
"You didn't used to be like this."
I paused at the foot of the staircase and turned back.
"How did I used to be?"
He didn't answer.
So I finished it for him. "Like her. Right?"
His face changed.
I didn't wait for it to settle. I went upstairs holding the rail.
In my bathroom I tipped two of the new pills out and swallowed them dry. The pain in my chest was the quick, prickling kind, like a wire heating up against bone.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
Annabel had sent a photo. Sebastian was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed at the Aster Tower's executive infirmary, head bent, tying her shoe.
The caption was one line.
Thanks for keeping him company for me, little sister. I'm home now.
The next morning Sebastian was waiting in the study.
A wire-transfer authorization slip lay face-up on the desk blotter. Aster Capital private-banking letterhead. The amount line carried a long, neat string of zeros.
I read it once. Three and a half million.
Lower than I'd budgeted.
Three years pretending to be in love with him on red carpets. Three years standing between him and two attempts on his life — once a man with a switchblade in a Public Garden parking lot, once a poisoned old-fashioned at a charity dinner I'd taken the first sip of so the security detail could swap the glass. Two cardiac arrests in that stretch, one fire, one bone graft. He had filed me at the price of a midsize Cambridge condo.
He sat behind the desk with his fingers spread on top of the slip, the way men sit when they don't want their hand to shake.
"Sloane. You've been with me three years. I don't intend to leave you with nothing."
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat.
"That phrasing, Mr. Aster — it sounds like paying off a girlfriend."
His eyebrow ticked. "Don't talk about yourself that way."
"What word would you like me to use, then?"
He didn't answer.
I helped him. "Stand-in. Forgery. The thing you used to manage the symptoms when Annabel wasn't in the country."
"Enough."
"It isn't."
He looked up. There was finally something hot under the gray of his eyes.
"Annabel is back. We'll be announcing the engagement on Friday. It's no longer appropriate for you to live here."
I smiled. "You're going to marry her."
"Yes."
"Because she pulled you out of the warehouse."
"Sloane."
His voice dropped, the way it did before he closed a deal he didn't like.
I nodded. "Understood."
I picked up the slip, folded it twice along the long edge, and put it in the inside pocket of my blazer.
Something in his face tilted, just a fraction. I think he had expected I would cry. He had expected the soft-voiced girl who, at thirty different points across three years, had asked him in a small voice not to send her away.
I didn't.
When I stood, the pain in my chest came up fast, like a hand closing.
I caught the edge of the desk before I went down.
Sebastian was on his feet. "What is it."
I waved off his hand. "An old problem."
His hand stopped in the air between us.
"I'll page Dr. Lin."
"Don't."
He was looking at the gray under my skin. "Sloane. Don't gamble with your own body to make a point."
"You misunderstand, Mr. Aster." I gave him the smile I'd been giving him for three years. "This body isn't worth the table stake."
I turned and walked out.
His phone rang at the door. I caught Annabel's voice through the speaker, soft as warm honey.
"Sebastian. My chest is so tight. Can you come?"
"On my way."
He didn't even pause.
My hand stopped on the doorknob.
Behind me he said, "Sloane. Hold onto the slip. I'll have someone drive you to the airport tomorrow."
I turned back.
"The airport."
"Annabel is unstable right now. If she sees you, it'll bring back the fire."
I nearly laughed myself onto the floor.
In that fire, Annabel hadn't gotten so much as a streak of soot on her wrist. The one whose left cheek had come open down to the bone — the one whose heart had been bruised black by smoke and concussion — that had been me.
"Fine."
He kept watching, like he was looking for a crack.
He didn't find one.
I had learned to keep the pain underneath where the lights couldn't catch it.
That night I packed my carry-on and called a car. He didn't see me out. He was at the executive infirmary, holding Annabel's hand.
At the front door, Connie came hurrying after me with a stainless travel mug pressed in both hands. Espresso, hot enough to burn through the lid.
"Miss Sloane. Mr. Aster — he really —"
I cut her off. "Connie. Don't sell him for me."
Her eyes filled.
"You loved him for three years. Anyone could see it."
I took the mug.
"Wrong."
"I came here to collect on a debt."