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Someone else being at her place when she called me over to see her felt off. There was something strange about her reaching out to me the way she did if she wasn’t alone. When I first read the text from her, it seemed like she was excited to see me. But now that I thought about it longer, it seemed more like urgency. She was adamant about me coming over to her place that night rather than us doing anything else or making plans for another night. It made me feel like she really wanted to see me, to get the conversation going, but now I had a sinking feeling.
I parked my bike and walked up to the door. Taking a deep breath, I knocked. Any hope I had for this evening going well disappeared when Kelly came to the door. She was wearing stretch pants and a lightweight, long-sleeved shirt. Her hair was tied up in a messy bun, and she’d washed off the makeup she wore to work that day. But it wasn’t her quest to be comfortable that was bothering me. Instead, it was the red rimming her eyes and the puffiness just beneath them. She’d obviously been crying, and that made my heart sink and my stomach flip over.
“Are you all right?” I immediately asked,
Kelly stepped back to give me room and gestured into the apartment.
“Come on in,” she said.
I followed her in, and she led me to the living room. There I noticed another girl sitting in one of the chairs. When she turned to look at me, there was a surreal moment. The girl looked almost exactly like Kelly. They wore their hair differently, and she was wearing makeup, but their features were the same. They had to be twins. This was another detail of her life I didn’t know about, and the discomfort of us not talking or sharing anything about ourselves in her earliest days working with me sank back in.
“Darren, this is my sister, Kira,” Kelly introduced. “I asked her to be here tonight while I talk to you.”
“You asked her to be here… from Canada?” I asked incredulously. Kelly nodded. “Wow. Well, that doesn’t seem to start the night off on a good note.”
“Sit, please,” Kelly said, ignoring my efforts to bring some levity into what felt like a tremendous amount of weight and stress filling the space.
I sat on the couch, expecting Kelly to sit down beside me. Even if she was on the complete opposite end of the furniture, at least she’d be showing some sort of connection to me. Instead, she stayed standing and paced back and forth in front of me. She wrung her hands and looked at the floor. A full assortment of terrible thoughts started rushing through my mind, getting louder and faster the longer she paced without saying anything. Kelly was obviously trying to build herself up to something difficult, and I had no idea what it was.
The fact that she’d called her twin sister and had her fly in all the way from Canada just to give her moral support through this conversation with me didn’t seem like a good thing. This wasn’t just asking someone to come a few blocks or cross town to be there in case of something going terribly wrong.
I felt like I needed to try to prepare myself for whatever she was going to say. I went over options in my head, came up with different ideas, and tried to figure out how I would feel if that was what she was frantically trying to prepare me for. But nothing at all could prepare me for what she was going to tell me.
24
Kelly
Darren sat on the couch watching me walk back and forth in front of him like an idiot. When I’d messaged him earlier, I was feeling at least somewhat confident. I knew it was the right time because it had to be the right time. If I kept waiting and waiting for the exact perfect time to come along, I would never get around to telling him the truth, and that just wasn’t an option. As soon as he agreed to come and then said he was on his way, it all went to hell. Fear and uncertainty immediately had tears streaming down my face, even though Kira was doing everything she could to calm me down and convince me I was going to be all right, that I could get through it.
We both knew it was time for me to face it head-on. Kira had known since before Willa was born and reminded me on a fairly regular basis that it was just going to get harder and more complicated the longer I waited. Most of the time it was just knowing looks or conversations she slipped the topic into when we were spending time together. Occasionally she decided to take a slightly more dramatic approach in hopes it would make a difference.
