She had built this entire scene — the public setting, the audience of our parents, the baby in Cassie’s arms as the final flourish — for that woman, the one who would crumble on schedule.

She had no way of knowing that woman no longer existed, and had not existed for eight weeks, and that what stood in the emergency-room waiting area wearing my face was someone who had read the blueprints of her own destruction and come to the hospital that morning specifically to watch them burn.

“Poised as ever,” I said. “Is that the script she gave you to read?”

Victoria thought she had just delivered checkmate. She had no idea that she was, in fact, four minutes from the end of everything she had spent twelve years building.

She did not know that in a little under three hundred seconds, the man she had cast as the hero of her private drama was going to walk through the automatic doors at the end of the corridor with a black folder under his arm — and that the folder was going to take the story she had told our family for years and reduce it to ash.

Chapter 2 — Three Hundred Seconds

To understand why I was smiling while my own family stood there trying to bury me, you have to understand that I was not the same woman Victoria thought she was talking to.

For most of my life, I had been exactly what she needed me to be — a target that didn’t understand it was a target.

I had spent twelve years thinking my sister competed with me over everything, grades and clothes and boyfriends and the shape of our parents’ attention, because she’d simply been born hungry for it.

I never once suspected there was a specific prize. I never suspected there was a plan.

And so, for twelve years, I lost, over and over, to a game I didn’t know I was playing.

That version of me was gone. She had died, quietly, at a kitchen table eight weeks earlier, in front of a laptop screen, and what stood in the waiting room in her place was someone who had read every page of what her sister had done and had spent every day since preparing this exact moment.

So when Victoria smiled her poisoned smile and waited for me to break, I checked the thin silver watch on my wrist instead.