Chapter 1 - The Boy Who Shouldn’t Have Known My Sister’s Name
I almost brushed past him.
The music was soft.
Champagne glasses glimmered beneath the garden lights.
Guests were drifting between white roses and silver lanterns while I smiled through a charity speech I did not want to give.
Then a small boy in a gray jacket stepped directly into my path and held something up in his palm.
A worn silver jeweled hair clip.
“She has the same hair.”
I pulled my hand back instinctively.
At first I thought he was trying to return something a guest had dropped.
Then I looked closely.
The clip was old.
Not expensive in the way my guests understood expensive.
Not new.
Not polished.
The silver had dulled around the tiny stones.
But I knew it anyway.
My throat closed.
That clip had belonged to my sister.
Mara.
Or at least that was what I’d believed for the last nine years.
My identical twin had disappeared before dawn one September morning, and by noon my mother had told me she was gone for good.
No body had ever been found.
No funeral had ever truly happened.
There had only been police, rumors, and my mother’s hard, final voice saying:
“Whatever affection you have left for her, bury it.”
Now a small ragged boy stood in the middle of my garden party holding the thing I had last seen in Mara’s dark-blonde hair when we were twenty-eight.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
The irritation had already left my voice.
The boy swallowed, but he didn’t step back.
He lifted the clip a little higher.
“My mom said I’d find you here.”
Something cold passed through me.
My guests had begun noticing.
A few turned.
A woman near the hydrangeas lowered her wineglass.
The boy’s eyes were wet, but steady.
He was frightened.
He was also determined.
I recognized that look.
Mara used to wear it when she was about to say something none of us wanted to hear.
I looked past him toward the hedge-lined marble walkway.
For one second I thought perhaps my mother had arranged some grotesque scene.
Then I saw her.
A woman standing in the shadows beyond the lantern light.
My face.
My exact face.
The same cheekbones.
The same mouth.
The same dark-blonde hair.
Older, thinner, harder around the eyes.
But mine.
Or rather, Mara’s.
Beside her stood Julian Cross in a black suit, jaw tight, hands at his sides.
Julian had once been our family’s outside counsel.
He was supposed to be in New York.
The champagne glass slipped from my hand and shattered across the marble.
I could barely hear it over the blood rushing in my ears.
“Where is she?” I demanded.
I wasn’t even sure which she I meant.
My mother.
My sister.
The version of my life that had just died in front of a hundred guests.
Mara didn’t answer.
May you like
She only looked at me with the kind of expression people reserve for graves they are not sure they want to open.
And I realized the garden party was over.
