Chapter 2The Girl in the Wardrobe

Last time, that was the reason he’d given, too. I looked like his dead sister.

Back then, when I learned I was chosen, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. I was taken to the Shaw’s sprawling estate, given a new name—Cora Shaw—and my very own room in their enormous house. I didn’t care that the room wasn’t truly mine. I was just grateful to have it.

“Girls from the system can be… unpolished,” Mrs. Shaw had said. “Their manners aren’t fit for our world.”

So, I shed my old self like a snake sheds its skin, molding myself into someone I no longer recognized. Mrs. Shaw was exacting. I was forced to practice the piano for hours upon hours every day. Even when my teacher insisted I had no natural talent, Mrs. Shaw would sit with me, a constant, smiling presence.

But you can’t force a flower to bloom in barren soil.

“I’m sorry, Mom. I still can’t get it right,” I’d apologize, my fingers aching.

And every time, she would look at me with that same indulgent expression and soothe me. “It’s alright, darling. As long as you keep trying, you’ll be wonderful one day.”

It was much later that I learned her deceased daughter had loved the piano. All of Mrs. Shaw's affection was just her projecting a ghost onto me. I was a stand-in.

I didn’t care.

A drowning fish doesn’t question the purity of the water; it only gasps for a breath. Her love was my water. I would take it, clean or not.

I tried harder at the piano, harder at pleasing her. We grew closer, our relationship blurring into something that felt real.

Until Hayden’s engagement party. He was drugged. I was the one who stumbled into his room.

When Mr. Shaw found us, the shock sent him into a fatal collapse.

Mrs. Shaw slapped me across the face, her eyes blazing with a hatred I’d never seen. “I should never have brought you into this house.”

Hayden just watched me, his expression unreadable. But I knew. I knew he was regretting it, too. Regretting the day he chose me to be his sister.

“I don’t know what happened,” I pleaded, my voice raw. “I didn’t drug him. I swear.”

No one believed me.

Later, for years, during every betrayal, every public humiliation in our forced marriage, he would sneer, “You drugged your own brother to marry him. Don’t you dare play the victim now. This is your karma.”

Hayden hated me. He took pleasure in shaming me, in making sure everyone in our circle knew I was beneath him. They all placed bets on how long our marriage would last.

“A year, tops,” they’d whisper. “The second that baby is born, he’ll kick her to the curb.”

They were all wrong. Hayden and I were tangled together for nineteen years. Even after I died, the words carved on my tombstone were: Beloved Wife of Hayden Shaw.

…

“Cora, tell me. Why don’t you want to be adopted by the Shaws?”

After his parents left, Mrs. Davison called me into her office. I was silent for a long time before offering a weak lie. “I don’t want to leave you and everyone here.”

She sighed, a heavy, tired sound, and urged me to reconsider. I knew she meant well. She wanted a better life for me.

But I refused to walk that path again. I would not have anything to do with Hayden Shaw.

That night, a fire broke out, and all my plans went up in smoke.