In the mornings, I would make breakfast and place it on the table, but he would glance at it and walk away. In the evenings, he wouldn’t come home for dinner, even when I sent him a message saying I had prepared his favorite dishes. However, he never stayed out all night.
I searched my memories and realized that the fake Edna had once said to him, "Hector, I don’t like it when you come home late. I worry about you." Because of that, no matter how busy he was, Hector always made sure to come back before 10 PM, and whenever he went on a business trip, he would send me a message ahead of time.
He wasn’t talking to me; he was trying to speak to his Eds through me. The only interaction we had was his persistent question: “Will she come back?”
Every three days, he would ask stubbornly. And each time, I gave him the same answer: “No.”
“Hector, no one wants a secondary personality to replace the main one. I am Edna. The fake Edna will never return!”
“She’s not the fake Edna!” Hector’s voice suddenly rose, nearly shouting. It startled me. He was rarely this emotional. Usually, he was composed, detached, and silent.
I swallowed the bitterness in my throat and tried to change the subject with a smile. “Let’s go to the concert. Look—it’s Kian Soltani’s. Didn’t you say you loved his cello the last time we watched him?”
I pulled two tickets from my bag, tickets I had spent a small fortune on, and held them out. But Hector stepped back as if I were holding something poisonous. He left abruptly, without a word.
In my desperation, I tried imitating the fake Edna, drinking poison to quench my thirst. I secretly learned piano, practicing for two hours every evening after work before heading home. I spent another thirty minutes each night perfecting my smile in the mirror. The fake Edna had been vibrant and lively—everything I was not.
I even forced myself to eat spicy food, enduring swollen lips and teary eyes. I popped a piece of candy in my mouth and kept going. Eventually, my body gave out, and I ended up in the hospital.
When Hector found out, he flew back from Japan immediately.
You see, it worked. When I used to get sick, Hector would just make a phone call, express polite concern, and have his assistant send over some skincare products. But now? Now I received the kind of attention that only the fake Edna had been afforded.