She called Mark before she’d even pulled out of the driveway, sitting with the engine off, hands shaking on the wheel. “I’m cancelling the wedding,” she said, before he could get out a greeting. “Julia, what — where’s this coming from?” “Tim showed me a photo of Chloe.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “She looks exactly like me. And the photo you showed me months ago — that wasn’t her. Who was that?”
Silence stretched long enough to answer the question on its own. “I need you to not come to the house tonight,” Julia said. “I need you to not call me. I need time to think.” She hung up before he could respond and sat in the driveway, replaying everything — the missing photos, the vague grief, the way he’d flinched whenever Chloe’s name came up, the stranger’s photo he’d handed her so easily, so convincingly.
It hadn’t been a coincidence. It hadn’t been grief that made him private. He had gone looking, and he had found her, and he had spent a year letting her believe she’d been chosen for herself. She drove home and didn’t sleep.