Not sleeping also gives you a lot of time to read. To listen. To watch. I’ve always been so fascinated by the way the mask slips when people think no one is looking. The way people turn into someone else as soon as they close their door on the world outside.

Leah wore so many faces it was impossible to know which of them was the real her. She fascinated me. I had hopes for her, a desire to crack through that hard outer shell to get to the soft squishy bits in the middle. I wanted to peel the layers away. But then Megan went and ruined it all, ripping Leah away from me before I was finished. Megan is boring in comparison to her sister. Megan has a “home persona” and a “work persona”; she thinks they are different, that her work colleagues would be ever so shocked by how different she is at home. Professional, smart and reliable versus fun-loving, spontaneous millennial; that’s what she thinks. In truth, they overlap by at least ninety-eight percent. My wife is dull and predictable, the kind of person who will mold themselves to those around her. She thinks that makes her enigmatic, that she is ephemeral, a changeling who flits around depending on the group she is with. But it does not make her funny, or charming, or kind, or any one of the other seemingly positive characteristics she labels herself with. It just makes her a weak fool whose only personality trait is that she will be whoever she thinks you want her to be. It’s not even limited to people she knows well; she’ll do it for shopkeepers, waiters, even the person sitting next to her on a flight.

Leah and I used to laugh about Megan and her pliability. Leah would tell me stories of the kind of trouble Megan got into when they were kids because she was always so quick to accommodate any request.

“I bet she was popular at school,” I had said.

“You’d think. But that was the one thing she always refused.” Leah had shrugged her shoulders. “You know how frigid she is.” We were lying on Leah’s bed, the sweaty sheets a tangled mess against the footboard. Her hand was stroking sweeping arcs across my stomach and chest, moving steadily downwards. “Do you like it when we talk about her?” She shifted so her breath was warm against my shoulder, her hand moving lower. “I think you do.” It was obvious that she was turning me on. “I think it makes you feel powerful that you can have both of us. And you get a kick out of knowing how much this would hurt her if she found out.” Her fingertips brushed against me and my breath caught in the back of my throat. And then she grabbed my hand and guided it between her legs. “It turns me on too,” she whispered.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to take messing with Megan up a notch. I’m sure Leah would have said it was hers; she did like to be in control, to take the credit even if it wasn’t entirely due. She spent her whole childhood taking the credit for all the good things Megan did, and passing over the blame for her own indiscretions. I don’t think she knew how else to be. She lived her life as if there were no bad consequences, no morals to bind her to a course of action, no sense that some things should be sacred. “Take, take, take” was her motto. Appended with “and if you can’t take it, prize it from the cold dead fingers of the one who won’t let you have it.” It made her a greedy, shameless lover and I couldn’t get enough of her.