Seven months of borrowed rent and stolen weekends and conversations that must have happened in the spaces around her life while she was working late or traveling for hearings or sitting across from her husband at dinner believing boredom was the worst thing in the room.
“You slept with him while I was paying your electric bill,” Carissa said.
Nikki’s face tightened. “You always say things like that, like help comes without strings.”
“It came with exactly one string,” Carissa said. “Don’t betray me.”
“That is so self-righteous.”
Damen stepped in. “Can we stop making this all about money?”
Carissa turned to him slowly. “That is easy for the only two people in this room who never paid any.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then Nikki said the thing Carissa would remember for years, not because it was the cruelest sentence spoken that night, but because it was the most revealing.
“He chose me,” Nikki said. “You can throw numbers around all you want. At the end of the day, he chose me.”
Carissa looked at her little sister and finally understood something she should have understood sooner. Nikki had not merely taken what was available. She had wanted the win.
Not the man.
The win.