Chapter 2

Isabelle returned to our home, my home.

She moved through the rooms with an unsettling confidence.

She picked up one of my miniature dioramas, a scene from our childhood, Julian's and mine.

It depicted the old oak tree by the river where we first met.

"Charming," Isabelle murmured, trying to sound like me, like she understood its meaning.

But her eyes were cold, assessing.

She was trying to piece together my life, to wear it like a costume.

I drifted through the walls, unseen, unheard.

My heart, if a spirit could have one, ached with a profound sorrow.

Julian.

We grew up in the same small town. His family was wealthy, mine struggled.

They' d helped us, sometimes. A loan here, a job for my father there.

When Dad died, Julian proposed.

It was quick. I knew part of it was obligation, a sense of duty he carried.

But I also knew there was something else, a quiet affection he rarely showed.

He was reserved, my Julian, lost in his books and manuscripts.

He worried his academic world overshadowed my simpler life, my art.

He never said it, but I felt it.

I loved him for his quiet depth, for the kindness he tried to hide.

My dioramas, they were my way of speaking to him, of showing him the beauty in small things, in our shared history.

Each one was a memory, a piece of us.

Isabelle picked up another, the one of the town fair, the year Julian won me a stuffed bear I still kept.

She smiled, a practiced, empty smile.

She didn't understand. She couldn't.

My brother, Leo. He was an art student, bright and talented.

After Mom died young, I raised him. He was my world before Julian.

Julian had taken Leo under his wing too, mentoring him, encouraging his art.

Isabelle wouldn't care about Leo. She wouldn't know how to.

The real Ellie was gone, and this creature was learning to mimic her.

I watched her, my anger a cold burn, my helplessness a suffocating weight.

She was an actress, and my life was her stage.