My Twin Sister Tore My Robe Off in Front of Two Hundred Guests to Expose My Scars—She Had No Idea Who I’d Invited to Watch

Vanessa glanced between us, her voice sharper now. “Who is that?”

“The investigator who handled the fire at the lake house,” I said.

My father stepped between me and the approaching man like that might undo the last thirty seconds. “Emily. Enough.”

Daniel stopped beside me and set his briefcase on the table, unhurried, like a man who had done this exact thing before. “You said to come if it ever became public.”

“It just did,” I said.

Vanessa let out a laugh with no air behind it. “This is insane. This is actually insane.”

Daniel popped the latches on his briefcase. Whatever was inside it, my mother clearly already knew — and from the way her hand had started to shake around her glass, she knew it was going to be so much worse than the version she’d spent twelve years believing was buried.

PART 3

Daniel Foster laid three photographs on the white tablecloth, one at a time, the way you’d deal cards nobody wanted.

The first showed a burn pattern along the baseboard of an upstairs bedroom — a low, fast-spreading scorch line that didn’t match the story of a space heater tipping over near the bed.

The second was a red plastic gasoline container, cracked from heat, photographed against a ruler for scale.

The third was the bedroom itself, taken before the fire during a home insurance walkthrough. My old bedroom. Vanessa’s laundry basket sat in the corner of the shot — she’d been using my room as overflow storage that summer, the way she used most things that belonged to me.

“When I went through my archived case notes a few months ago,” Daniel said, “I found photographs and lab results that never made it into the official statement my department released to your family.”

My mother’s voice cracked down the middle. “You have no right to —”

“I have every right,” I said, before she could finish. “I asked for the original file myself. Public records request. It’s mine to have.”

Vanessa’s eyes had gone glassy and fixed on me. “You reopened the investigation.”

“I didn’t reopen anything,” I said. “I requested records that already existed. There’s a difference, and you of all people should be glad the case was never formally reopened.”

“What does that mean?”

I didn’t answer her directly. I looked at the photographs instead. “You’d taken Dad’s car again that week. You clipped the gate coming up the driveway and I told you I was done covering for you — that if you did it again, I was calling the police myself.”