“Was it all a lie?” Lovey asks in a sad squeak of a voice. She’s looking at me.

“No,” I say, crying harder now, crying in the middle of the living room in front of the entire family. “No, only our engagement was a lie. Everything else—who I am, and how much I fell in love with all of you—that’s all the truth. I loved being part of this family!”

“How much?” Jack asks the silent room. She is staring right at me, burning straight through me.

“What do you mean?” I ask, even though I know.

“I didn’t get to that part of the webcomic, but I want to know what this was all worth to you. How much?”

I drop my head. “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

Jack pivots in her boots—the same ones she’s been wearing since yesterday—and barrels out of the room.

“Wait! Jack!” I shout after her, following her out of the house, out the back door, out into the snow. “Jack! Please!”

She stops in her tracks a few feet from the porch and looks at me with eyes like fire, eyes that want to reduce me to ash. “You were pretending to be his fiancée,” she says, like that’s it. Like that’s the end of us.

“I didn’t know!” I gasp. “I had no way of knowing you were his sister when I agreed to go along with Andrew’s plan, and then I was here, and—”

“And what? What? What is your excuse for not telling me the fucking truth the second you saw me?”

“I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“How? How could you ever think that?”

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’ll never stop being sorry.”

“Do you have any idea how guilty I felt all week?” She’s crying. Jack is crying in the snow because of me. “The fact that I wanted you, even though you were with my brother,” Jack lashes at me. “The fact that I couldn’t stop flirting with you, couldn’t stop finding excuses to touch you. The fact that I was so desperate to kiss you under the mistletoe. I was so angry at myself for betraying my brother like that, and it turns out this entire time, your relationship with him was fake. You let me believe I was a terrible person!”

“I’m so fucking sorry!” I fall to my knees in front of her because I don’t know what else to do. “I was going to tell you the truth!”