The One Who Always Stood Behind

The One Who Always Stood Behind

My sister and I are twins.

Same face, same birthday, but never the same place in our family.

I loved Alessandro for five years.

Five years later, at our own engagement party, he got down on one knee — not to propose to me, but to ask for my blessing to be with my sister, a woman he’d fallen for after one chance encounter, right in the middle of us being together.

My parents just stood there.

No one took my side.

I left that house, changed my name, and rebuilt everything from nothing.

Two years later, just as I was learning how to let someone truly love me again, my sister — by then only engaged to Alessandro, not yet married — showed up again, with that same familiar look in her eyes: the look of someone used to taking whatever I had.