Countdown：The Fake Heiress Took My Husband—Then I Vanished

Everyone in my family could see the countdown above my sister's head. One hundred days until Celeste left our world. One hundred wishes to make her last days perfect. Her first wish was for my clothes. My closet was emptied before lunch. Her thirteenth was to see what I'd look like with a shaved head. My brother held me down while the stylist cried and kept cutting. Her eighty-sixth was to paint a picture using my blood. I woke on a clinic cot with a needle in my arm and my mother telling me not to make a scene. I told myself I could endure a hundred days. They still loved me. After Celeste left, we'd become a family again. Her ninety-seventh wish was to marry my husband. At the ceremony I'd spent eight years waiting to have, my brother stopped me at the aisle. “Just let her have this, Elena. Three days. Then you get everything back.” I tried to move past him. He shoved me. My knee struck the marble step, and something gave with a sound I felt more than heard. Across the room Graham stood beside Celeste. She wore the dress I'd embroidered by hand. Our six-year-old, Theo, stood in front of me. “Stop spoiling it. Aunt Celeste is leaving.” I reached for my husband's eyes. He looked at her instead. “I do,” he said. There was no legal officiant. Graham was already married to me. Everyone kept reminding me of that, as if a ceremony could only hurt when a court recognized it. My mother touched my shoulder. “It's pretend, sweetheart.” “Then why am I the only one pretending it doesn't matter?” Applause swallowed the question. They knew Celeste came from another world. She'd told them the glowing numbers were proof she would be taken away. They didn't know I came from another world too. And the countdown wasn't hers.