Chapter 2I Was Just My Sister's Marriage Test Subject

My parents were always biased. Haley was the golden child; I was the background noise. I had realized that when I was barely old enough to form memories.

When we were kids, I was sent to the neighborhood public elementary school down the street, walking home alone every afternoon, constantly picked on by the older kids. Haley, on the other hand, was enrolled in an elite private academy twenty miles away. Rain or shine, my parents personally drove her back and forth every single day.

When it came time to choose a major in college, I wanted to study graphic design.

My mother threw a historic fit. She cried, screamed, and emotionally blackmailed me until I caved and enrolled in a rigorous pre-med track, eventually dragging myself into a brutal medical residency program.

Yet, when Haley graduated high school a few years later, she didn't apply to medical school like she had always promised. She picked Corporate Finance instead.

One afternoon, when our parents weren't home, I asked Haley why she had abandoned medicine.

She looked at me with bright, innocent eyes, twirling a strand of her hair. "Oh, Mom said medical school is awful. She said the hours are grueling, the burn-out is crazy, and the golden era for doctors is over anyway. We don't have any high-level connections in the hospital system, so I’d just be grinding myself to the bone for nothing. Mom told me to go into finance so Uncle can just give me a cushy job at his firm."

The breath left my lungs as if I’d been struck in the chest.

Everything Haley rattled off was insider knowledge—hard truths you only learned after drowning in the medical system. Where had my mother gotten all that information? From me. From watching me cry over textbooks at 2:00 AM, from listening to me vent about eighty-hour hospital shifts.

I was her crash-test dummy.

She wanted Haley to go into medicine, but she was afraid of the dark, treacherous waters. So she threw me in first to map out the depths. Once she saw how deep the current was, she pulled Haley back and handed her a smooth, paved highway.

My suffering was the blueprint for Haley’s happiness.

And now, the man I had loved for three years was being packaged up and handed to her on a silver platter, too.

My mother wanted to give Haley the world. But this time, I refused to yield.

An icy cold war began.

Or, more accurately, I cut my mother off completely. I stopped texting her, stopped visiting. She, predictably, didn't bother to reach out to me either. I let myself drown in the dark silence, refusing to bow my head.

Haley, however, began texting me occasionally, her messages dripping with casual complaints:

“Nora, Mom’s standards are ridiculously high. Every guy I talk to gets torn apart by her—except Gavin, of course. At this rate, I’m gonna end up an old maid.”

I stared at the glowing screen for a long time before typing back: “Why do you keep calling him Gavin?”

I remembered distinctly that she used to call him "Brother-in-law." I hadn't realized when that shifted to just "Gavin"—a casual, intimate familiarity.

Haley replied instantly, oblivious to the knife she was twisting:

“Oh, Mom told me to! She said you guys might not end up together anyway, so I shouldn't call him 'Brother-in-law' so I don't get weirded out later.”

I felt like I was plunging through ice.

I forced myself to sit down and reconstruct the timeline. Haley had stopped calling him my fiancé about a year ago—right around the time I was hospitalized with a compound leg fracture after a bad car accident.

My parents had dropped by the hospital twice, performing dutiful, shallow check-ins before slipping away. Gavin was the one who stayed.

For three straight months, Gavin lived in that hospital room with me. He drove miles out into the countryside every weekend to buy fresh organic chicken just to stew rich, nourishing broth for my bones. He bathed me, cooked for me, carried me to the bathroom, refusing to let nurses do what he felt was his duty.

I remembered one afternoon when my mother brought over a dish of spicy eggplant. Gavin ate it all himself, gently reminding her that nightshade vegetables could trigger inflammation and slow down my surgical wound healing.

He had spoken with such authoritative care. I remembered the look in my mother’s eyes that day—a sudden, intense, calculating heat.

By the time I could walk again, Gavin had lost nearly twenty pounds from exhaustion.

It was right after my recovery that my mother’s attitude toward Gavin flipped overnight. She began inviting him over constantly. And every single time Gavin sat down at the dinner table, Haley was placed directly across from him.

Connecting the dots tore my soul apart. Long ago, while I was broken in a hospital bed, my mother had already decided that Gavin belonged to Haley.

And I had been the oblivious clown, smiling through the pain.