Chapter Forty-Seven Jenn
Chapter Forty-Seven
Jenn
One week later
We join the crowd shuffling down the escalator, pressed shoulder to shoulder until we spill onto the platform. It’s even stuffier here—thick, warm air clinging to the concrete as the engines idle, humming with that restless, itching-to-depart energy long-distance trains always have.
Sam—Mary—keeps her hood up, chin tucked. Her backpack looks too small for a person about to become someone else.
“You’ll text when you get to Chicago?” I ask, tugging the hem of the outerwear straight, like some fussy parent.
She nods. “Yeah. And when I get on the next train. The . . . uh . . .”
“Empire Builder,” I remind her gently. “To the St. Paul station.”
“Right.” She tries for a smile, but it’s thin.
The PA system crackles to life overhead:
“Now boarding the Lake Shore Limited, service to Chicago. Track eight. All passengers, please prepare to step aboard.”
People start moving.
We step with them.
She stops a few feet from the open train door and turns to me, eyes steady in a way that feels older than twenty-three.
“Jenn . . . I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for me. You’re making all of this possible.”
“Well, we’re not completely out of the woods yet. You’ve got a lot of heavy lifting to do. Do you have the lawyer’s number? She’s expecting your call.”
She nods. “I’ll pick up a spy phone when I get there.”
“A . . . spy phone?” I echo, confused.
A smile fills her face—it’s wistful, and sad, and amused all at once. And it’s the first completely raw, unfiltered emotion she’s shown me to date.
“It was a joke . . . between me and my sister. Me and Sam.”
This makes me smile in response.
“You’re going to be okay. Just . . . please consider reaching out to your parents. Not today or tomorrow, necessarily. But maybe once things are settled for you and Jocelyn.”
She looks away for just a moment.
“I just don’t know how that would work, how we go back. There’s so much water under that bridge.”
I shrug.
“Yeah, well, you’ve handled Class IV rapids before, haven’t you? It might get dicey, but you’ll navigate it. And you know I’m always here to throw you a line if you need one.”
She launches herself toward me without warning, catching me up in a hug that nearly takes me down.
“Oof!”
I reach around, clutching her to me, pressing my face into her hair. It smells like apples and flowers. If I close my eyes, I can pretend, for just a moment . . .
She pushes me away as quickly as she enveloped me, holding tight to my forearms as she studies my face carefully. She knows what I was thinking. She can sense it with the creepy “twin sense” we’ve got going on between us.
“What you told me about Jess. About letting go.”
My breath stills.
She doesn’t hesitate.
“Jenn, you didn’t,” she says, uttering my name for the first time. “You didn’t let go. But you should have.”
Her words are unnerving.
“Wh-what? I-I don’t understand . . .” I stammer.
“Look, I know I’ve only known you for a few weeks, but I can see it. I saw it the first time we met. What you’ve been hauling around with you all this time isn’t Jess’s life. It’s her death. And what came after.”
I’m so stunned by the words that I can’t formulate a response. Not that she’s waiting for one.
“If you let go of that, it doesn’t mean you let go of her,” she tells me softly. “She already lives in your heart. She always has.”
She hesitates then, just long enough that I feel another thought gathering behind her eyes.
“And you get to live a life she didn’t,” she adds. “A whole one. With . . . whatever comes. Whoever comes.”
Her gaze flicks—barely—to my left hand.
“You don’t have to shut the door on the parts you two used to dream about. Jess wouldn’t want that for you.”
How she can see so deeply at twenty-three is beyond me—except it isn’t.
Losing a twin. Living under another name. Preparing to raise a child who isn’t hers.
Mary Langston has lived more life in the past few years than most people do in decades.
Of course she understands things people her age normally don’t.
The words land inside me like a pebble dropped down a deep well—soft, small, but echoing long after they fall.
I open my mouth—though I’m not sure what I mean to say—but the conductor gestures her forward.
I see it then, so clearly.
Mary Langston steps off the platform and onto the train. But when she turns around to face me from inside the Lake Shore Limited, it’s Samantha Kinski who lifts a small, uncertain hand.
“Wish me luck!”
The doors slide shut with a hiss.
For a few suspended seconds, we just look at each other through the glass—her on a train bound for Chicago and then Minnesota and a life she’ll have to build from scratch; me rooted to the platform, unable to accompany her to this first stop of that future.
But I’ll be there for her when she needs me.
The long-distance engine shudders, the cars lurch, and the Lake Shore Limited carries her away down the darkened tunnel.
Leaving me alone with the gift she doesn’t know she handed me.
Or maybe she does.