Someone Stole My Body—and My Husband Knew

Someone had been wearing my body for four years. Wearing my face. Working her way into my husband and my son.

The way the story was supposed to go, I died in that crash four years ago and I stayed dead. But the sunshine female lead hadn't finished winning them over yet. And I woke up.

The comments were already tearing into me. The pathetic side character, crawling back to wreck everything. No chance the male lead would ever take her.

That was when my husband held out a glass of orange juice. The one thing on this earth I couldn't get down. My hand came up on its own. "No, I—" I never finished.

He swayed on his feet, and his eyes filled right there in front of me. Chapter 1 Four years since I'd seen him, and I almost didn't know the man holding that glass out to me.

I didn't know what those years had done to Corbin Vance. Whatever it was, it had taken almost everything. His face used to stop rooms. Now it was cut down to the bone.

Cheekbones sharp, eyes sunk deep, jaw held in one hard line. Nothing moved behind them. Four years had taken the man out of that face and left the bones.

The man I married had been polished and careful and expensive. This one looked like something left out in the weather all winter.

My eyes stayed on his face a second too long, then dropped to the glass in his hand. From the way he held it, it was meant for me. My breath stopped. My stomach rolled over hard.

Without deciding to, I started to wave him off. "I don't—" The comments surfaced again. [Dying.

The female lead LOVES orange juice, she has to have a glass every night before bed.] [But the side character walked in on the nanny spitting in her juice when she was little.

Now she gags just looking at it.] [Omg. So the male lead is about to find out the pathetic side character is back?] [Good.

Once he knows, he'll find a way to get the female lead back. The side character is finished.] [Uh.

Anyone else thinking he already noticed something was off, and the juice is a test?] They blinked out. And my hand stopped halfway up. Perfect timing. He'd caught something.

I could see it happening. His eyes held on me, black and patient. He pushed the glass an inch closer, stubborn about it. "…What's wrong?

Why aren't you drinking it?" My fingers shook. There was no more room to stall. I reached out and took the glass. Tipped my head back and drank all of it.

That was the thing I gagged at from across a room. Going down, my throat kept trying to close on it. Then I pulled up a bright, sunny smile for him. The comments had me right.

I'd always been the timid one, and worse around him than anyone. In the same room as this man I couldn't even raise my voice, let alone smile like that.

The person who smiled like that was the sunshine female lead. The one who'd been wearing me. I could see pieces of her memory, though.

If those pieces were good, the step after the juice was thanking him for it. Sweetly. I crinkled my eyes at him. "I'm fine. It's really good.

Thank you, Cor…" The sentence never got finished. Everything drained back out of his face. He didn't look at me again. He turned and walked toward the door, one step, then another.

At the doorway something in him gave. His hand shot out and caught the frame. His knuckles turned white against the wood. He hung there, swaying, half a second from going down.

Chapter 2 It scared me. I was off the bed before I thought about it, reaching for him. "Are — are you okay?" My fingers never made it to his sleeve.

He turned his shoulder out of reach and walked through the door without looking back, and the line of his back was pure ice. My hand stayed up in the air.

I watched the doorway he'd disappeared through and bit down on my lip. When I was a kid, every time my sister and I fought, my parents took her side. They never asked what happened.

Not once. Then the whole house would close up on me, like they'd agreed on it beforehand. Nobody spoke to me.

Not one person, not one word, until I went to my sister with my head down and said I was sorry. So the silent treatment and I had history. Did he catch something?

The lock clicked shut down the hall. Only then did I get myself into the bathroom, where all of it came back up. The comments started arguing over my head. [No way.

The male lead still hasn't noticed the female lead is gone? The side character copied one habit and slid right past him?] [Give it time. Same face, different person inside.

He doesn't get to read the comments like we do. He can't tell that fast.] [Ha, did you see how pathetic she looked just now? Scared stiff like a rabbit. The female lead would never.

The colder he gets, the warmer she comes back at him.] [Right?? That's been their whole dynamic for years. Him cold all year round, her never quitting.

I ship them so hard.] [The icecold male lead and the sunshine female lead are perfect together. Wasn't the girl he wanted to marry originally the side character's sister?

Wasn't she a sunshine type too?] [Yes! The sister didn't want him, so he settled for second best and married the side character. The defective one.

He never loved her at all…] I got a hand on the wall and pushed myself up. Walked to the mirror. And finally saw what I'd become. A heartshaped face. Fine, arched brows.

Clear skin, makeup done down to the last detail, eyes with real light in them. She had made this face of mine beautiful.

More beautiful than my sister, who I used to envy in secret and never once said so out loud. I rubbed my eyes. They stung. The comments weren't wrong.

Clementine Ashby was the same kind of person as this socalled female lead. Bright, easy with everyone, never awkward a day in her life. A walking sunbeam.

She walked into a room and every head turned. She had enough admirers to fill a stadium. She and I were opposite ends of the same house.

For as long as I could remember, I lived inside one label. Clementine's little sister. I wore what she'd worn. Ate what she'd left. Used what she didn't want.

Compared every day, talked down to everywhere, overlooked for years at a stretch. It hollows a person out. So I learned to walk with my shoulders pulled in.

I trailed her like a shadow. Never asked, never pushed, never lifted my head. Couldn't raise my voice. Then one night at dinner, old Mr.

Vance brought up the match between the two families. He didn't say which daughter. Nobody needed him to. The Vance heir. The man who'd be running the company.

Young, with the whole thing laid out in front of him. He was going to marry Clementine. Everybody loved Clementine. Not me. It was never supposed to be me.

There was just one thing I didn't understand. For four years he talked to this face of mine, every single day. Whose name was he saying inside his head?

Chapter 3 And at Clementine's debut party, the year she turned eighteen, the first dance had been hers and Corbin's.

Except when word got to her about the match, her face shut down on the spot. Her mouth pulled to one side. "I decide who I marry. Me." "So he's handsome and rich and perfect.

So what? Nobody owns me." She said that, and then she walked out on the engagement and got on a plane to Paris. The match still had to happen.

So my parents gritted their teeth and looked at me. They never asked what I wanted. They put me in the car the Vances sent.

The door shut, and through the glass I watched their shoulders come down. Relief, plain as day on both of them.

I didn't have my sister's kind of nerve, the kind that lets you walk out of a room and never look back.

I didn't have what she had behind her either, the people who catch you no matter what you break.

So I sat in that back seat pinching the skirt of a secondhand dress that didn't fit, and I couldn't stop the stories about him from cycling through my head.

He'd chew you up and spit out the bones. He turned on people faster than you could blink. He was a monster.

I stared at my own smeared reflection in the window and walked myself through every worst case. He'd make it hard. He'd humiliate me.

He'd say I wasn't fit to stand in for Clementine, and have me put out the front door in front of everyone. Fine. People had been disappointed in me my whole life.

One more wouldn't land any differently. Except he took one look at me and said yes.

His grandmother was still midsentence, still explaining, and he'd already nodded. "It doesn't matter who I marry." Flat. Like he was agreeing to a lunch order.

Then he glanced sideways at me. And he took off the ring he never took off. I only found out later what it meant. He'd worn it for years.

It meant he wasn't planning to marry anybody. Our wedding night, neither of us knew what we were doing. It hurt so much I passed out.

When I came back, the only light in the room was the lamp by the bed, turned low.

He was sitting on the edge of the mattress in a robe with a warm washcloth balled in his fist, wiping the sweat off my forehead. Over and over. He saw my eyes open.

The crease between his brows let go for a second, then came right back. "Odette. Why didn't you say it hurt?" I was afraid of him.

I pulled the blanket up and shook under it. "I'm — I'm sorry…" Something moved through him. He stopped talking altogether.

He looked at me for a long time, and whatever was working behind his eyes, I couldn't read a word of it. Something like regret. Or something else.

For the next month he came back to the master bedroom every night, on time, and never touched me again. At first I was quietly grateful.

Then a different kind of panic came up the back of my neck. Had he started to find me repulsive? The second I sensed somebody didn't want me around, I'd start trying to please them.

It was reflex. It was the only survival skill I owned. So I shut myself in a room and read everything I could find about it for an entire day.

That night I got my nerve up and pushed open his bathroom door, the one standing half open. That time I passed out three separate times. Not from pain.

Nobody gave that marriage a year. Me least of all, the standin.

The story people liked was that my sister turned him down, and the love curdled, and he married me to get back at her. A few bored gossip accounts even started a betting pool.

The bet was how long before Corbin Vance divorced me. I knew about all of it. It didn't hurt, though. Because I'd been ready to be divorced from day one. Corbin was a good man.

He didn't love me. But he never once hurt me either. That betting pool. Every last person in it lost. We never divorced.

It's just that four years later, the person standing at his side. Wasn't me anymore. Chapter 4 He did do things that made no sense, though. Like when he traveled for work.

He'd video call me a dozen times a day. Sometimes he'd buttdialed me. Sometimes he needed a file found. Sometimes the call connected and he didn't say anything at all. Or this one.

He hated sweets. And every evening he came home from the office carrying little cakes from the bakery, a different kind each time.

Which meant I ate them, since I was the one with the sweet tooth. What an idiot. One night he was late, and he came through the door with a bouquet on top of everything else.

I love flowers that smell like something. So I peeled the paper back one careful corner at a time and stood them in a vase, and I couldn't keep the corners of my mouth down.

When I finished fussing with them I looked up straight into him watching me. He moved his eyes away without any expression at all. "Passed a place on the way.

Picked them up." I dropped my head and twisted my fingers together. "Really? They're — they're so pretty. I love them…" No answer. He looked down and pressed his lips together.

After that night there were flowers with the little cakes. Every single evening. I have no eye for clothes.

My closet stayed full of ugly things I never wore, and I'd embarrassed him in public more than once because of it.

My cousin heard I'd gotten married and shipped me a few boxes from out of state, all at once. I waited until he wasn't home yet and tried them on in the bedroom with the door shut.

It wasn't until one of them was actually on me that I understood what my cousin had sent. It was lingerie. The minutes kept going.

My eyes were burning by then, and I still could not get the ties behind my back undone. That was when the bedroom door opened.

He walked in rubbing the bridge of his nose, tired, pulling his tie loose with the other hand. His eyes came across me and stopped dead. I froze where I stood.

I wanted to put my whole head into the floor. "I'm sorry, I — I don't know, does it look bad? My cousin sent it, I didn't know what it was…" "No." Fast. No pause at all.

His throat worked. There was something wrong with his voice, low and scraped raw. "…It looks good." He waited a beat.

Then he leaned in, and his voice dropped further, coaxing, close to a dare. "Can't get it undone? Do you want help?" "Let me help you.

Okay, Ettie?" Ettie was the name my grandpa made up for me when I was small