Chapter 3 - Chloe had never just been difficult
People later tried to reduce Chloe to a single label. Jealous. Unstable. Violent. All of those things were true by the day she attacked me, but none of them explained how she got there.
Chloe was my younger sister by four years, and she had spent most of our lives measuring herself against me. When we were kids, it showed up in small things—stealing my clothes, lying to get me blamed for broken dishes, turning every compliment I received into some private insult she stored away. When we got older, it became uglier. If a boyfriend treated me well, she decided I was smug. If a job offer came through for me, she called me lucky. If I set a boundary, she called me judgmental.
Our father used to say Chloe didn’t hate other people’s happiness so much as she couldn’t stand the idea that life might not rearrange itself around her. That was harsh, but it was also the closest anyone came to naming the problem.
After he died, the little discipline that had ever existed in our family vanished. I worked, saved, and eventually built a stable life for myself. Chloe bounced from one impulsive plan to another. She tried event styling, then luxury resale, then a short-lived “wellness brand” funded mostly by borrowed money. By the time I married Ethan, she had already burned through most of her friendships, maxed out multiple cards, and developed a habit of appearing only when she needed rescue.
Ethan tried to be kind to her. That was his mistake.
He never encouraged her romantically, never crossed a line with her, and never gave me any real reason to doubt his loyalty. But he was patient with people in distress, and Chloe treated patience like an invitation. If Ethan paid for dinner, she read devotion into it. If he helped her with a legal referral after one of her debt disputes, she treated it like proof that he understood her better than I did.
By the time I got pregnant, Chloe had stopped pretending her resentment was just sibling rivalry. She hated that I had a husband who loved me, a child on the way, and a family name attached to a life she thought she deserved more than I did.
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That should have been enough for me to keep her far away.
Instead, I kept hoping blood would matter more than envy.
