Chapter Twenty-Three Jenn #2
She doesn’t look at me as she shakes her head, instead facing forward, staring through the expansive panes of glass toward a huge clock tower off in the distance.
“And why is that?” I press gently.
Mary shrugs her narrow shoulders, refocusing on the drink in her hands, twirling the green straw so that the ice spins around the perimeter of the tall cup. “There’s nothing they have to say that I want to hear.”
“And what about you?”
She turns her attention back in my direction. “What about me?”
I wish I could see her eyes behind the dark lenses.
“Is there anything that maybe you’d like to say to them?”
Her chapped, cracked lips twist into a smirk. “Oh, I’ve already said everything I had to say to them.”
There it is again, that hint of saltiness that wasn’t there when we met yesterday.
“May I ask what they did that you decided to just cut them out of your life?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“No. I asked, but your mom changed the subject.”
This makes her chuckle, brows raising above the pink frames. “I’ll bet she did!” When I don’t offer a response to the comment, she sighs, and the smile fades. “It wasn’t what they did to me. It was what they did to Sam. According to them, everything is her fault.”
“Yeah, I kinda got that.”
“Right? In their minds, were it not for Sam, we’d still be the picture-perfect family. Because, you know, it’s all about the picture.”
“I don’t know what that means. Can you explain it to me?”
She huffs and throws up the arm that isn’t holding her shake. “Just that appearances mean a lot to my family. Sam wasn’t good for optics.”
“How so?”
“She was a little too rough around the edges—too coarse, too direct. She didn’t sugarcoat anything, and she didn’t treat my parents with the deference they thought they deserved.
Which was interesting. They didn’t want her for a daughter, but they sure as hell expected her to treat them like parents. The whole thing was ridiculous.”
I latch onto something in that statement. “Why, was Sam hoping they’d treat her like a daughter?”
“If you’re asking if she was trying to get money out of them, no. She never asked them for a thing.”
Her voice is stony.
“And you? Did she ever ask you for money?”
“No,” the young woman snaps a little too sharply.
She pauses and takes a deep breath, her tone more even when she continues.
“Look, it’s like I told you before—Sam had a shit life, and when she came to stay with us, she finally had a chance at a family.
But there were my parents being all ‘She’s not our daughter. You are.’”
I have to suppress a smile at her spot-on imitation of Terry. “So, then, not the reaction you were hoping for.”
“What I was hoping was that they’d react like the kind, generous people they supposedly were.” Resentment drips from each word like acid.
“You don’t believe that anymore? That they’re kind and generous? I mean, you just told me Sam came to live with you. That was pretty generous of them.”
“They only did that because they felt guilty—after the accident.”
“Right. She fell out of the moving car. They said she got hurt pretty badly.”
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.
I blink at the whiplash. “Did you?”
“I read about your sister.”
Of course she did.
“When you said she died in an accident, I thought you meant a car accident,” she continues. “Not an amusement park ride.” Her voice drops. “That was . . . my God. That was horrific. And it was all over the news.”
I nod once.
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
She tilts her head.
“So you can understand why Dr. Braithwaite thought you and I might be a good fit. Not just because I lost a twin too, but because the worst experience of my life played out for the whole world to see. Not a lot of people share that, do they?”
“Not many,” I admit.
“Do you ever feel responsible?”
“Every day,” I tell her honestly.
Mary leans back, assessing me. “Why?”
“Because I let go.”