Stand-In Three Years, His True Love Returns, I Fake Death

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I spent three years standing in for the woman Rex Delgado couldn't get over.

I wore the white dresses she liked and grew my hair long the way she wore hers.

Even at meals with his mother, I had to stay nailed to the seat that had once been hers.

I knew he didn't love me. I signed that contract anyway, the one that bought away my dignity.

Then Seraphina Whitmore came back alive, and Rex drove out that same night to bring her home.

The next day, the two of us were tied up and dragged into an abandoned nursing home.

When the knife came down, I still threw myself in front of him like a fool.

The first thing I did when I woke was beg the police to put me in witness protection.

And that was how Gwendolen Swanson died in that kidnapping.

Two years later, I came back to the country as Anna Sutton and took my seat on the investigation panel at the Delgado hearing.

Across a room packed with reporters, Rex stared at me, not daring to say the name they'd buried.

The night Seraphina came back, I was washing Jill Mason's hair.

Jill was Rex's mother.

Six years ago, a fire on a cruise ship damaged her brain, and her memory rolled back to the year she turned forty.

That was the year Seraphina Whitmore was her favorite future daughter-in-law.

And I happened to have a face half like Seraphina's.

Jill wouldn't take her medicine, wouldn't let the caregivers near her. The only thing that ever settled her was the sight of me.

Three years ago, Rex chose me.

Not only for the face, but because I had caregiver credentials.

He handed me the contract.

"All you have to do is play Seraphina in front of her. What you do with your own life, I won't interfere."

I read to the pay line and pushed it back.

"I don't want money."

Rex looked up.

I met his eyes and laid out what I'd been hiding for two years.

"I want to stay by your side."

He was quiet a long time, then printed a new contract.

Term of care: three years.

Apart from Jill's treatment, I'd keep my own name and wouldn't have to imitate Seraphina.

The last clause he added himself, by hand.

Neither party may use this contract to demand or imply any emotional return.

I signed.

Outside the contract, there was something between us neither of us would name.

He let me sleep in the master bedroom, held me hard in the middle of the night, and answered when I kissed him first.

But once it was light, he wouldn't touch me again.

Once I tested whether we counted as lovers.

He only reminded me not to forget the last clause of the contract.

I was the one who couldn't let go.

I knew intimacy in bed wasn't the same as love, and still I told myself that if I just held on a little longer, he'd finally separate me from Seraphina.

Back then I was naive enough to think three years was long enough to warm a stone.

Only later did I understand that Rex wasn't heartless.

He'd only locked his heart away, and the key was engraved with another woman's name.

When the footsteps sounded outside the bathroom door, Jill had just dabbed a bit of foam onto the tip of my nose.

She was laughing like a child.

"Seraphina, once you marry in, if Rex ever dares mistreat you, I'll throw him out."

The door opened.

Rex stood outside, rain on his collar, a tall thin woman behind him.

Her face was pale, a faint scar at the tail of her left brow.

That face in the photographs. I'd seen it far too many times.

Jill's bedroom, Rex's study, the old files at the care center, she was everywhere.

Seraphina Whitmore.

The woman missing six years had come back.

Rex's eyes landed on my face and stayed there only a heartbeat.

"Gwendolen, come out."

It was the first time he'd said my name all night.

And the last.

Jill gripped my hand, watching Seraphina warily.

"Who is she?"

Seraphina's eyes reddened.

Rex crossed to her and crouched in front of Jill.

"Mom, this is Seraphina."

Jill looked at her, then at me, and suddenly hurled the shampoo bottle.

"Liar! My Seraphina is right here!"

The bottle grazed Seraphina's shoulder and hit the floor.

Rex was on his feet at once, shielding her.

Not a moment's hesitation.

My hair was still wet, water running down my neck, and I was shivering with the cold.

Three years ago, the first time Jill's illness sent me stumbling into broken glass, he threw himself in front of me exactly like this.

That was the moment I let myself believe I had a chance.

Now the same man, the same motion, left my foolish devotion nowhere to hide.

I dried Seraphina's hands and passed her to the caregiver.

In the living room, Seraphina sat cupping a mug of hot water, telling how she'd fallen into a lifeboat and been carried off by a foreign ship.

When she woke her memory was a wreck, all her documents gone, and only half a year ago did she remember her own name.

Rex stared at her, knuckles white.

I didn't interrupt. I went up to my room and changed out of the white dress she liked.

Twenty-seven dresses hung in the closet. I took none of them.

Only a small suitcase.

On my way down, Rex finally noticed me.

"Where are you going?"

I set the contract on the coffee table.

"The three years were up yesterday."

Seraphina looked up at me, her expression hard to read.

Rex's brows pressed down.

"Mom's rejecting Seraphina right now. Stay one more week and help her through the transition."

So he was keeping me back to let the real Seraphina slide smoothly into my place.

And it still hurt.

My palms went numb, and yet my face stayed frighteningly calm.

"Mr. Delgado, the contract is over."

"It can be renewed."

"I won't renew."

He hadn't expected me to refuse. He planted himself in front of the door, his voice dropping low.

"Gwendolen, don't pick a fight over this now. Mom's illness isn't a game."

I looked at him.

In three years I'd sat with Seraphina through seventeen acute episodes.

She'd bitten me, and in her clear moments she'd sewn buttons back onto my clothes.

I knew she feared the dark, knew her medication left her mouth dry, knew she kept the thing that mattered most to her in the old music box on her nightstand.

Rex, though, thought I was using a sick woman to force him to bend.

"I'll send the handover records to the doctor."

I stepped around him.

My hand had just touched the doorknob when Seraphina let out a shrill scream upstairs.

Rex spun and rushed up, and I stopped too.

Seraphina stood at the top of the stairs, her face white.

"She thinks I'm someone from the fire."

Jill was huddled in the corner, crying over and over not to let it burn.

When I came close, she instantly threw her arms around my waist and clung.

"Gwendolen, save Seraphina."

Everyone froze.

For the first time in an episode, Jill had called me by my right name.

She had recognized Seraphina.

Rex stood rigid where he was.

I patted Jill's back and only came out once she'd fallen asleep.

Seraphina was leaning against the wall.

"She's always known you weren't me, hasn't she?"

"She has her lucid moments."

"Then does Rex know?"

I didn't answer.

He didn't know.

Because in her clear moments Jill had written three letters, all delivered by her doctor to Rex's office, begging him to stop the stand-in therapy.

Rex never opened a single one.

Those letters ranked behind Seraphina, right alongside the meals I cooked, the lights I left on late into the night, the calls I made when I was burning with fever.

Still, I stayed.

Not for Rex.

Jill had only just grasped reality; switching people suddenly would make her worse.

I promised the doctor three final desensitization sessions.

Before the third, the power went out at the care center.

The backup supply was slow to kick in.

When Rex got the call from the caregiver, I was helping Jill sort through old photos.

There was no caregiver's voice on the line, just a man, his tone grim.

"If you want your mother to live, bring Gwendolen to the old South Building."

"Only her. Seraphina isn't worth anything."

Rex's face changed in an instant.

The old South Building was a private nursing home the Delgados had put up years ago.

It had been shut for eight years. The cameras and fire systems had all been stripped out long before.

The police told us to stall for time.

The moment Rex heard Jill crying on the line, he grabbed the car keys.

I pressed my hand flat against the door.

"I'm going with you."

"No."

"They asked for me by name."

For the first time, panic flickered in his eyes.

"Gwendolen, you already ended the contract."

The words came too late.

For three years he'd pushed me out in front of every risk the therapy carried.

Now that the contract was gone, he finally remembered I had the option not to go.

I pried his fingers loose.

"I'm going to save Aunt Jill. I'm not taking a risk for you."

There was no Jill at the old South Building.

Only Rex's uncle, Curtis Delgado, and four masked men.

The instant I stepped into the hall, the iron door slammed shut behind me.

Curtis pushed a tablet toward us.

On the screen, Jill lay in another room, her wrists strapped tight to the bed rails.

"That care trust in her name gets transferred out today."

Rex moved in front of me.

"You want shares, come to me."

"Your shares were pledged off long ago."

Curtis turned his cold eyes on me.

"Miss Swanson knows better than anyone whose voice Jill still listens to when the episodes hit."

He wanted me in the white dress, playing Seraphina, coaxing Jill into speaking the authorization phrase.

At last I understood why that stand-in contract three years ago had gone through so smoothly.

The person who first recommended the scenario-substitution program to Rex was Curtis.

From the very start, he'd been waiting for Jill to mistake me for Seraphina.

"She's already recognized me."

Curtis let the smile drop.

"Then we make her sick again."

He had them pin Rex down hard in a chair.

The gun wasn't loaded. The knife was real.

When the blade pressed to the side of Rex's neck, Jill's crying broke through the tablet.

I put on the dress and sat down in front of the camera.

Curtis handed me the script.

I glanced at it, then tore it to shreds.

"She won't say it."

The blade sank into Rex's skin.

Blood ran down along his collar.

He kept his eyes locked on my face.

"Gwendolen, don't worry about me."

Hearing my name, I almost laughed.

When he needed me to play someone else, he called me Gwendolen.

And when he might lose me, all he could say was don't worry about me.

Curtis ran out of patience and struck me hard across the face.

I hit the corner of the table, my mouth full of the taste of blood.

On the other end of the tablet, Jill suddenly stopped struggling, staring at the dress on my body.

"Gwendolen, take that dress off."

Curtis's face went livid.

Jill kept cursing.

"Curtis Delgado, you used these clothes to trick me for three years, and now you want to trick me a second time?"

So she had known all along.

Hidden inside the old music box was the cargo-hold inspection sheet from before the cruise ship caught fire.

The defective batteries Curtis had sourced were where the fire began.

Before Seraphina vanished, she'd slipped that sheet into the music box and entrusted it to Jill for safekeeping.

What Curtis wanted had never just been the trust. It was that one piece of paper that could put him in prison.

I'd seen the false bottom of that music box once, while helping Jill sort through her old things.

The paper had gotten damp, so I gave it to Elaine Fox for archival restoration.

Before the power cut out, Jill wrote Curtis's name for the first time in her lucid-day log.

Only then did I have Elaine hand the original over to the police.

Curtis flew into a rage and clamped both hands around my throat.

Where is it?

With the police.

A shrill siren rose outside the window.

Curtis's men broke into chaos.

Chair and all, Rex slammed backward into the kidnapper behind him and fought the knife out of his grip.

Someone lunged at him from the side with a blade.

I didn't have time to think. I threw myself in front of it on instinct.

When the knife drove hard into my lower back, it didn't hurt the way I'd imagined.

I just couldn't stay standing.

Rex caught me, his hands shaking beyond control.

Gwendolen.

Leaning against his chest, I saw him cry for the first time.

Not because Seraphina had disappeared, not because Jill had collapsed.

Because of me.

The knowledge only left me tired.

Rex.

His tears fell on my face.

I'm here.

Don't take me to your family's hospital.

He held me tight.

I won't. You're going to be fine.

I wanted to say more, but everything went black.

When I woke again, there were no city lights outside the window.

Elaine sat at the side of the bed.

She was Jill's attending physician, and the first person to oppose the stand-in therapy.

The knife nicked a blood vessel. The surgery's done.

I flexed my stiff fingers.

Where's Rex?

Out looking for you.

Elaine handed me a phone.

In the news, a transfer ambulance had caught fire under the overpass.

The police statement said a female patient had gone missing, with a large amount of blood and my personal belongings found at the scene.

Curtis's men had slipped into the hospital and tried to silence me during the transfer.

The police had swapped vehicles ahead of time and gotten me into a protected ward. The one that actually burned was empty.

The task force can protect you, but you have to change your identity.

No one in the Delgado family can know you're alive.

I looked at the screen.

Rex stood beside the burned-out ambulance, his white shirt soaked in blood.

He was tearing at the charred door with his bare hands, palms scorched raw and bloody, and he didn't stop.

If I'd seen this three years ago, I probably would have forgiven him his coldness.

But now, all I felt was how absurd it was.

While I was alive, he treated me like a contract he could renew whenever he pleased.

It took my death for him to admit it hurt.

Elaine watched me.

Have you decided?

I closed my eyes.

I have.

That day, a new name went into the witness protection files.

Anna Sutton.

Gwendolen Swanson was listed as missing in the kidnapping case.

Three months later, she was confirmed dead in that transfer accident.

I left no note.

I only asked Elaine to pass Rex one line.

The last knife Gwendolen took for him settled the debt of these three years of loving him.