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1
Lookingat Amber has always been like looking in a mirror.
I haven’t seen her in nine years, so the experience is eerie, unfamiliar. She still has our natural hair—medium brown, straight, and shiny—while I started highlighting mine blond shortly after I left home. Her clothes are much more elegant and expensive than my faded jeans and leather jacket. But the green eyes, small nose, full lips, high cheekbones, curvy figure, and fair skin—all of it is exactly like mine.
There are a few minor differences, of course. I have a small scar at my temple from a fall off monkey bars when I was five. Amber’s eyebrows are thinner and darker than mine, and her arms are more toned since I’ve been too scared and distracted to go to the gym lately.
But we’re identical twins, and no one could ever tell us apart.
Even our father would get us confused far too often.
He was a crappy dad in worse ways than that.
Amber stopped talking to me when I walked out the day I turned eighteen even though I repeatedly explained I was leaving him and not her. I begged her to come with me. She wouldn’t give up on our father, which meant she gave up on me.
All my attempts to get in touch with her—before and after our dad died two years ago—went unanswered. Even the desperate, rambling voice mail I left her two months ago explaining that I have a stalker, and I’m scared, and I really need someone to trust was ignored.
Until two days ago. I got a letter forwarded from my previous PO box to my new one. Amber. She sent me a phone number and asked me to call.
She said she’s sorry. She’s not angry anymore. She wants to make up for things. She has an idea that might help us both.
I’m not sure there’s anything left that could help me. The police won’t do anything about Vince Montaigne, my stalker, until he makes a more direct threat, and he’s got friends in the department anyway, including his best friend, Detective Curtis.Having an admirer is different than having a stalker. Don’t be melodramatic. Take it as a compliment.That’s what Detective Curtis told me with the most condescending smirk imaginable.
I can’t trust the police. I can’t trust anyone. I’ve had to move twice and quit my job. I never had many friends, and now I’m afraid to even go outside.
Amber is my twin sister, however. If I can trust anyone in the world, it’s her.
So yesterday I bought a bus ticket from Houston to Atlanta and then another one from Atlanta to DC. I used cash for both since I’m convinced Montaigne has been able to track my credit card purchases. The tickets used up almost everything left in my bank account, but at this point, I don’t even care.
Maybe I can at least make up with Amber before Montaigne kills me.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, she and I meet at a coffee shop in Georgetown.
Amber pulls back when I try to hug her, so we stare at each other instead.
“Hi, Jade,” she says at last.
“Hi.”
Jade and Amber Delacourte. Those are our names. The only thing that could make the names more ridiculous is the fact that our father was scion of a hundred-year-old jewelry dynasty.
Our dad was brilliant. An artist in precious metals and stones. But he was the world’s worst businessman and gradually piddled away the entire Delacourte inheritance. The more money he lost, the more he drank and the meaner he became. By the time I turned eighteen, I’d had enough of cowering behind the locked door of my bedroom and putting up with his ruthless verbal attacks.
I moved halfway across the country with nothing more than a three-year-old car and the skill with jewelry my dad taught me. I didn’t go to college, but I eventually got a job with a jeweler who never asked or cared how I came to learn the craft.
He never questioned the fact that I was uniquely talented and decidedly overqualified for the position he gave me. I mostly did repairs and the occasional custom piece for an engagement or anniversary. The job paid enough for a quiet, comfortable life, and that was all I was looking for back then.
Now I don’t even care about comfort. My only dream is to be able to walk outside without constantly scanning my surroundings, searching for one face in particular.
We order our drinks and take a seat in a back corner with a clear view of the door so I can see everyone who comes in.
“I’m sorry, Jade.” Amber’s nails are beautifully manicured with elegant french tips. Her hair is pulled back in a sleek chignon. Her outfit is tailored trousers and a cashmere sweater—both in a lovely cream color I’d be constantly worried about spilling coffee on. Her purse and heels are deep red. Designer.
She always cared about the trappings of wealth more than I did, and she hated our family’s decline. When we were girls, she’d talk through all kinds of crazy fantasies about how we might one day regain our wealth.
Most of those daydreams involved latching onto a rich, handsome man.
“Wh-why are you sorry?”
