Entry One
Dear Diary,
I never thought I would write these words. I never imagined that the price of my father’s sins would be paid with my life. But here I am, standing in a penthouse that costs more than my entire neighborhood, wearing clothes I did not choose, playing a role I did not audition for.
His name is not important. Not yet. What matters is what he said to me on the first night, his voice low and utterly calm, as though he were reading from a contract rather than rewriting my entire existence.
“You will be her. You will smile when I need you to smile. You will stand where she stood. And when this is over, you will disappear, just as quietly as you arrived.”
She. His wife. The woman whose ghost lives in every corner of this apartment. Her perfume still lingers in the wardrobe. Her photograph sits on the mantle like a silent accusation. And I, Kelly, a girl who grew up counting coins just to afford textbooks, am supposed to slip into her skin like it was tailored for me.
I should hate him for this. I do hate him for this.
But last night, when he thought I was asleep, I heard him standing outside the door of this room. He did not knock. He did not enter. He just stood there, in the silence, for a long time.
And I do not know what frightens me more. The fact that I heard him. Or the fact that I waited.
Entry Two
Dear Diary,
He looked at me today. Not through me, the way he usually does, as though I am a piece of furniture arranged to fill an empty space. He actually looked at me.
We were at dinner, one of those impossibly silent affairs where the cutlery is louder than the conversation, and I made the mistake of laughing. It was nothing. A memory that caught me off guard, something from home, from before all of this. But the sound seemed to startle him. He put down his glass and stared at me with an expression I could not read.
She must not have laughed like that.
I went back to being invisible after that. But the damage was done. For one unguarded second, I had been Kelly. Not his dead wife’s understudy. Not a transaction. Just Kelly.
And he had seen her.
I am not sure either of us knows what to do with that.
Want to read what happens next? Kelly’s full story is waiting for you.
