Chapter 2: The Sister I Left Behind
Eleanor retreated to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. She splashed cold water on her face, but the reflection staring back wasn't the powerful, wealthy socialite everyone feared. It was a frightened girl from a dirt-poor town, a girl named Elara who had run away from the shame of her family, leaving her younger sister, Sarah, to fend for herself.
She looked at her hands. They were trembling. That dress wasn't just a dress. It was the wedding gown their mother had worn, the one Sarah had painstakingly repaired when their mother passed away, the one Eleanor had refused to take when she chose to walk away from their life of struggle.
"Sarah," she whispered to the empty room.
She thought of the day she had chosen her path. She was eighteen, ambitious, and hungry. She had met a wealthy man in the city, a man who didn't know anything about her background. To keep him, she had to erase her past. She told him she was an orphan, that she had no living kin. She didn't look back when she heard Sarah was struggling; she didn't look back when she heard Sarah had gotten pregnant out of wedlock and vanished into the rural countryside.
She had convinced herself she was a survivor. But looking at the stitching on that dress, she realized she hadn't survived; she had simply become the villain in her own sister’s story.
Eleanor stepped out of the bathroom, her composure replaced by a desperate, churning guilt. She looked at Lily, who was waiting nervously. Eleanor suddenly saw the resemblance—the shape of the jaw, the color of the eyes. She was looking at her niece.
"Who was your mother, Lily?" Eleanor asked, her voice uncharacteristically soft.
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"Her name was Sarah," Lily said, surprised by the change in tone. "She passed away five years ago. This dress... it’s all I have of her legacy."
Eleanor felt the room spin. She had spent a lifetime running from her origins, only to find them sitting in her bridal suite, wearing a dress she had once deemed "cheap rags."
