Page 66 of Mirror Image

Mary nods. “Yeah, she broke some ribs, I think, and her pelvis. The worst, though, was the road rash. It was unbelievable—I was amazed she wasn’t permanently disfigured. Anyway, that’s when I guilted my parents into letting her come and recuperate at our house. I mean, we lived in a fucking—sorry, freaking—mansion. I don’t know, I guess I figured that maybe once she was there, and we all had a chance to get to know one another . . .”

“What?” I coax gently. “What did you think?”

She huffs in frustration. “I just wanted to share some of what I had with her: having a family, living in a nice, stable home. Movie night, vacations, stuff like that. It would have been so easy to bring her in. Instead they tried to pay her off.”

I was just extending my arm, reaching for my iced tea, when she says this. I retract it and shift toward her. “How do you mean?” I ask slowly.

Mary’s head tips back against the cushion behind her with a jagged little laugh that I find vaguely alarming. “How do you think I mean? My parents offered Sam a two-hundred-thousand-dollar check to leave and cut off all contact with me. Nice, huh? What an epic crock of shit.” She mumbles the last sentiment under her breath, her face turning stormy as she shakes her head, clearly disgusted by the memory.

I sit back hard enough that, for a brief moment, the rocker feels as if it’s going to flip over onto the terra-cotta tile below our feet. Maybe this was what Doug and Terry were holding back from me. It’s pretty damning if it’s true. “Are you sure it wasn’t some kind of misunderstanding?”

She scoffs. “Oh, there was a misunderstanding, all right. I’d just gotten my hair cut short like Sam’s, and my mother thought that’s who she was talking to. You should have seen the look on her face when Sam—the real Sam—walked in and Mom realized she couldn’t tell us apart. She’d had no idea who she’d been talking to. That was when we packed up our shit—sorry, our stuff—and got the hell out of there. We’d been planning to leave anyway. This just pushed up the timeline. And it made me decide I didn’t want to come home again. Like ever.”

I consider this as I start rocking again slowly, my eyes drawn out to the view of palm trees lining the main drive into the hospital property. It’s really lovely what they’ve done to this place—so much nicer than the facility I remember. For a split second, I wonder how much of it was made possible by the Langston family. Then I shake my head at the thought. There must be hundreds of donors supporting Miami Killian. And so what if it was them? The ultrawealthy need ultra tax write-offs, don’t they?

“Did your mother have trouble telling you apart all along?”

“No, because my hair was long, and Sam’s was short. That morning I’d gone to see my stylist and showed her a picture of my sister. By the time I got home, we were identical. Identical identical. If we’d grown up together, we could have totally fooled people.”

She says it with a trace of pride, like the trick itself was a small act of rebellion.

“And you were able to fool her like that? She didn’t notice a difference in your speech pattern and mannerisms?”

She waves a hand at me dismissively. “By then we’d nailed each other’s voices, movements, even signatures. It was a game to us. A challenge to see who could do a better job of ‘becoming’ the other.” She pauses for a moment, something flickering behind her sunglasses. “Did you and your sister ever do that?” she asks. “Pretend to be each other?”

I smile faintly at the memory. “Once or twice. Jess could do my voice perfectly, and she thought it was hilarious to confuse people. But we never tried it on our family. They knew us too well. Plus, she was terrible at lying.”

“Sam wasn’t,” Mary says. “She could make you believe anything if she wanted to.”

There’s an edge there now, the warmth from earlier leaching away.

She’s quiet for a moment, then asks—not sharply this time, but with a kind of tentative curiosity I haven’t heard from her before—“Did you and your sister ever talk about . . . you know. The future? Getting married, having kids, all that stuff?”

The question catches me off guard, not because it’s too personal, but because of the way she asks it—sideways, like she’s testing a thought she hasn’t quite named.

“When we were little? Constantly,” I say with a faint smile. “Jess had our whole lives planned. Matching houses. Kids the same age. Coordinated Halloween costumes for the rest of eternity.”

A breath of warmth flickers through me, then dims.

“And after she died?” Mary asks quietly. “Was that still something you wanted?”

The answer rises automatically—no—but it snags on something in my chest, catching like a loose thread pulled too hard.

A small, startling ache opens up beneath my ribs, so unexpected it makes me blink.

“I . . . didn’t think about it after that,” I admit. It’s the simplest truth I can give her without handing over the whole psychology behind it. “It just stopped being something I could picture.”

Mary’s gaze drops briefly to my left hand, to the thin gold band I never mentioned.

“But you still got married,” she murmurs. Not judgment—just observation. “So some of the future still fit. Just . . . not all of it?”

Something in me shifts—barely, but undeniably. A flicker of something I don’t have the space or clarity to examine—not here, not now.

“Something like that,” I say softly.

She studies me for half a second longer, then pulls off her sunglasses and says, “I googled you, you know . . .”

And just like that, the moment slides away—but the flicker stays, tucked somewhere under my breastbone, waiting.