I Out-Cried the Fake Heiress

After I was reunited with my birth family, my "sister," the girl who had taken my place, tearfully offered me her fiancé. "Lily," she said, her voice a model of selfless understanding, "James is yours. I'll step aside."

The moment she cried, the whole family turned on me with aching hearts and pointed fingers.

I understood then. This family responded to weakness, not strength.

So I dropped to my knees with a thud, my sobs louder and more desperate than hers. "Aurora, how can you step aside? If you do, James will blame me, Mom and Dad will blame me, and my brother will blame me! What's the point of me even being alive?"

I wailed, grabbing a fruit knife from the nearby table. "If you don't agree to stay with him, I'll die right here!"

The entire family froze, their faces a mask of shock.

Aurora, the fake heiress, was stunned speechless.

A joke. When it came to crying, I was the undisputed queen.

1.

In my first week back at the Sterling mansion, I felt like an alien who had crash-landed in someone else's world.

And Aurora Sterling, the girl who had lived my life for eighteen years, was the princess of that world.

One day, a team of workers arrived, carrying ladders and cans of paint. They were going to repaint the entire villa in Aurora's favorite shade: a soft, buttery cream.

My room, originally a tasteful off-white, was on their list.

I stopped the workers, my voice soft. "Could you please not paint my room?"

Aurora drifted over at the sound of my voice, linking arms with our mother, her eyes already welling up. "Lily, don't you like it? I'm so sorry, I wasn't being thoughtful. I just thought you'd like a warm color, too."

Our mother’s brow furrowed as she looked at me. "Lily, Aurora meant well. Why are you being so ungrateful?"

Our father put down his newspaper. "It's just a bit of paint. It's best if the whole house has a uniform style."

I looked at their entitled faces and understood.

In this house, my opinion didn't matter. Only Aurora’s tears did.

Fine. My own eyes reddened, and my voice, thick with unshed tears, was even more wounded than Aurora's. "Dad, Mom, I'm not ungrateful."

"I just heard... I heard that this was the nursery you prepared for me when I was a baby. This color... this was the color you chose for me with your own hands all those years ago."

I lifted my head, my eyes shimmering with tears I stubbornly refused to let fall.

"I wanted to keep it... as if... as if I was never lost at all."

"I wanted to feel, just for a moment, what it would have been like if I had grown up with you."

My voice began to tremble, finally breaking into a choked sob.

"I'm sorry. I'm being selfish. I shouldn't have asked. Go ahead and paint it. Just... pretend I never came back."

The living room fell into a dead silence.

The blame on my parents' faces morphed into shock, then into a tidal wave of guilt.

My mother pushed Aurora away and rushed to hug me. "My sweet girl, don't cry, don't cry. It's Mommy's fault. We're so sorry."

My father roared at the...