My Sister Stole My Mate, And I Let Her

Chapter 532: Chapter 532 A NEW CHALLENGE (BONUS Chapter 2)

MAYA’S POV

I’d been in a lot of high-stakes, stressful situations in my life, and none of those were as daunting as looking in my mother’s eyes and knowing I was about to change her life forever.

At Sera’s quiet gesture, everyone else in the bridal suite silently excused themselves, the door clicking shut behind them until only my mother and I remained.

She pulled a seat towards me and sat, frowning with concern.

“What is it, honey?” She reached for my hand and squeezed. “You’re scaring me a little.”

She was scared? I was terrified. What I was about to tell her would change—or, more accurately, ruin—her life forever.

I looked down at our joined hands and tried to figure out how to condense over a decade of fear into a single sentence.

Just get it out, Maya.

So I did.

“I came home in the middle of the day one time in Sophomore year,” I began quietly. “I’d forgotten notes for a test.”

Her brow furrowed. “Okay?”

“And I...I heard Dad in your bedroom.” I forced myself to look into my mother’s eyes, the same warm brown eyes I’d inherited.

“With another woman.”

My mother froze, her grip on my hand tightening.

I watched the realization creep across her face, watched those identical eyes widen in horror.

“What?” Her voice was soft and small.

I forced myself to continue before I lost my nerve entirely.

“H-he called her Sasha. I didn’t see anything, but I heard enough, and I remember standing outside that door thinking that your whole life was about to fall apart and that somehow it was my responsibility to stop it."

The words kept pouring out as if a tap I’d kept tightly shut for years had suddenly burst open.

"I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Mom. I know keeping it from you was wrong, but I was sixteen and scared, and I didn’t want to be the person who destroyed your happiness. I kept thinking I’d tell you tomorrow, or next week, or the next time I was sure something had happened, and then somehow years had passed and I was still carrying it around."

For a moment, my mother simply stared at me, her lips parted and eyes wide. I braced myself for her reaction—for disbelief and anger and sorrow.

Then, to my absolute bewilderment, she laughed.

Not the brittle, disbelieving laugh of someone trying to process betrayal, and not the sharp, angry laugh of someone who had just discovered her daughter had hidden something life-altering from her for years.

It was a genuine burst of amusement that made me question her sanity.

"Mom?"

She pressed a hand over her mouth, but it did little to contain the manic giggles spilling from her.

"Oh no."

"Mom."

"Oh, sweetheart."

Alarm rang through me. Had I broken my mother?

Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes as she shook her head and tried, with very little success, to regain control of herself.

"Oh, your poor father."

"My poor father?" I repeated incredulously. "He was the one cheating on you with a bitch named Sasha!"

That sent her over the edge entirely.

She bent forward, laughing so hard that I genuinely considered summoning medical assistance.

Eventually, she managed to pull herself together enough to draw a steadying breath.

"Oh my sweet girl,” she said, her voice still trembling with the remnants of laughter, "Sasha isn’t another woman."

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

Her expression shifted from amusement to slight embarrassment.

"Sasha is me."

I blinked at her.

"Uhm...what?"

"If you’d stayed outside the door another thirty seconds, you probably would have heard me call your father Dimitri."

My mind went completely blank.

I stared at my mother while she stared back at me with cheeks that were rapidly turning pink.

Slowly, horrifyingly, understanding began creeping over the horizon of my confusion.

"No."

"Oh yes."

"No."

Her lips twitched. “When you’re married for so long, you get the urge to try new things.”

"Oh, my gods."

"We’d watched a movie, and it involved Russian spies and accents—"

I clamped both hands over my ears.

"Nope."

"It wasn’t even our strangest one—"

"Nope!"

"—there was also a brief Italian phase—"

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!"

My mother laughed again, and I prayed for the ground to open up and swallow me—no, her.

“Oh, honey.” Her laughter softened, and she squeezed my hand. “You carried all that for the last fifteen years?”

“Yes!” I hissed. “And you’re telling me it was fucking roleplay?”

“Language,” my mother chided.

“Oh, no.” I shook my head. “You don’t get to be a prude right now, Sasha.”

She threw her head back, the sound of her laughter warm and bright and utterly incompatible with the scene I had imagined a thousand times over the years.

As much as part of me wanted to be offended on behalf of my prolonged psychological suffering, relief was already unfurling in my chest, loosening knots I had carried for so long.

Because, holy shit, there had never been another woman. There had never been betrayal or infidelity.

A laugh escaped me then, shaky and disbelieving at first, and then flooded with relief.

For so long, I had carried that afternoon around like a stone lodged beneath my ribs.

It had been a testimony of love’s fragility. Proof of fate’s fallibility.

Now, it turned out the only thing I had uncovered was evidence that my parents were freaks in the bedroom.

Suddenly, I was laughing so hard that tears gathered in my eyes and I could barely breathe.

My mother reached across the small space between us and caught a tear before it fell and ruined my makeup.

"Oh, sweetheart."

The laughter gradually faded, but the feeling it left behind remained: as if someone had opened a door inside my chest and let fresh air into a room that had been sealed shut for years.

"I spent so long being afraid," I admitted, looking down at our joined hands. "I believed that if it could happen to you and Dad, then it could happen to anyone—to me."

Understanding flickered across her face, followed quickly by guilt.

"I am so sorry, honey."

I shook my head. “It’s not your fault.” Another burst of laughter spilled out of me. “Well, it kind of is, but—”

"Maya."

I looked up at my mother.

“Just as easy as it was for you to doubt love because of that misunderstanding, I don’t want you to now think it perfect because the air has been cleared.”

She held our intertwined hands up and pressed them to her chest. “The love your father and I have nurtured over the years wasn’t due to luck or fate, and it certainly isn’t perfect.

“We chose each other over and over again. Through arguments and bad years and mistakes and grief and exhaustion and all the thousand tiny moments that make up a life together.

“Marriage isn’t finding someone you’ll never struggle with. It’s finding someone worth struggling beside.”

My lips trembled even as they pulled into a smile, and I said without a single shred of doubt, “Ethan is that person.”

He had loved me through stubbornness and fear and sharp edges and impossible situations, and I had loved him back with one arm tied behind my back because of something he had absolutely nothing to do with.

Not anymore.

My mother’s eyes shone as she pressed a kiss to my knuckles. “Then what are we waiting for?”

As if on cue, a soft knock sounded against the door before it eased open a fraction, and Sera’s head appeared through the gap.

Her gaze moved between my mother and me, lingering for a moment on our joined hands and the unmistakable redness around my eyes.

Concern flickered across her expression as she asked carefully, "Everything okay in here?"

My mother and I exchanged a look.

Then we both started laughing again.

Sera frowned. "That is somehow the least reassuring response you could have given me."

My mother rose from her chair and crossed the room to squeeze Sera’s shoulder as she passed.

"Everything’s fine, sweetheart," she said, amusement still lingering in her voice. "Though I suspect I might have given my daughter an aversion to Russian movies.”

Sera blinked. "I’m sorry?"

"Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to," I said quickly.

Sera, wisely, took my advice to heart.

She looked between us once more before apparently deciding that whatever emotional crisis had occurred was no longer actively unfolding.

"Well, as entertaining as whatever nervous breakdown this was appears to have been, we’re running out of time." She glanced down at the tablet in her hands before looking back at me. "Twenty minutes, Maya."

The words should have sent my heart into another tailspin.

Instead, they settled quietly inside my chest.

Twenty minutes until I walked down the aisle.

Twenty minutes until I saw Ethan waiting for me by the lake.

Twenty minutes until I promised the rest of my life to the man I loved more than anything in the world.

Sera tilted her head. "Are you ready?"

For a moment, I didn’t answer.

Instead, I let myself feel it: the absence—the silence where fear had lived for so long.

No stone lodged beneath my ribs.

No whispers of all the ways happiness could slip through my fingers.

No secret tucked away in some hidden corner of my heart, quietly poisoning moments that deserved better than suspicion and doubt.

I drew in a slow breath, letting it fill my lungs all the way to the bottom. It felt like the first breath I’d taken since I was sixteen.

Then I smiled.

Not the tight, nervous smile I’d been wearing all morning, but something steadier and infinitely more certain.

"Yeah," I said softly, “I’m ready.”