The Side Effects of Marriage

Chapter 17

The silence pricked at Amara, gnawing at her. She didn't usually mind the silence when it was with another person, but she had never liked being alone. Layla had never seemed to mind it, though, even preferring it. But as children, even though her younger sister liked to be alone, she knew that she would always be up for anything Amara suggested. It had been all too easy to convince her to tag along with for almost anything, in those days.

Now? She was beginning to suspect that twenty years apart had had a bit too much of a sobering effect on their bond, dispelling the hero worship that Layla had looked up at her with.

There was nothing interesting happening. She checked her laptop, the obvious cameras and microphones that she'd bugged Layla and Hayden's house with now discarded. However, the far more discreet and advanced technology was still in every nook and cranny of their house: unnoticed. Watching. Waiting.

The security feed told her that Layla was sleeping, having gone to bed to take a nap at eight pm. Loretta had returned from her spa appointment, or so it seemed, as she sat at the kitchen island, reading a Korean newspaper. It wasn't too late to call... was it? Loretta would think she was awfully rude, Amara knew. But she liked the woman, genuinely.

Perhaps she hadn't meant to make friends with Layla's mother-in-law for any other reason than to annoy her sister, but now? Well, she kind of liked the woman. She was funny, in a subdued way, and motherly in a way that didn't leave Amara feeling suffocated. She may have been on her own for the past two decades, living on the streets and both consuming and selling drugs, as well as other illicit substances and cargo, but... She'd missed her mother.

Amara could never return to her own family now. Why not graft herself onto her sister's, as much as Layla might have been irritated by the intrusion? On the laptop screen, Loretta turned a page of the newspaper and lifted a hand to her face as if to brush away a tear. Her diamond ring glittered.

Amara got up from the floor, shut her laptop, and grabbed her purse and keys. It was still odd to stay in the same house for so long, to have a place to sit and a place to put her clothes and other things. To hang up items in a closet without needing to live out of a suitcase as she had done for so long. To eat food from a refrigerator, to put things in a freezer, knowing they'd be there for longer than a few days. It was odd, instead of hunkering over ramen noodles or frozen pizzas, to eat real food.

The idea felt like a luxury. A privilege. Something she didn't deserve and shouldn't get used to.

Layla had never asked her where she'd been the past two decades.

Instead, she'd kept her at a distance, at arms' length, always cordial enough beneath the brusque exterior, but never letting her close. And why should she? Why would she bother letting Amara in when her sister had been the original sinner, the first one to hurt her, the first one to abandon her? When her first scars, her first heartbreaks, were from Amara?

Instead, her first words when Amara had dropped back into Layla's life had been simply, "You know, there's still a website up about you. It says that you're missing. But you were never missing, were you?"

And Amara had simply smiled, and said, "Does that mean you didn't miss me?"

She wasn't sure why she had chosen now to re-enter her sister's life in earnest. After all, she'd been keeping tabs on Layla ever since she had left university that fateful day. Even when they'd taken her from her family, she'd held onto a few things, a few momentos. The toy makeup palette that Layla had given her when she was eight and Amara was eighteen. The teddy bear that Amara and Layla had gotten as part of a matching set when Amara was fourteen and Layla was four. Pieces of her sister forever crystallized in time and never to mature, to age, to wither.