Chapter Eight
The bell chimed overhead, welcoming me into the vanilla-scented haven. I spotted her immediately—standing behind the counter, frosting a tray of the cupcakes responsible for that mouth-watering scent.
“Welcome to CCC,” she called, not looking up. “Feel free to browse, I’ll be with you in a moment. But a little tip, we’ve got a sale going on everything chocolate from chocolate chip cookies to chocolate ganache cupcakes.”
“Sounds delicious.”
Courtney’s head snapped up, her hand jerking and squirting the frosting all across the counter like jizz.
“You always knew the way to a girl’s heart.”
I couldn’t have pictured Courtney’s jaw-hanging, bugged-out expression if I planned it.
I took the first step. “Okay, I know this is weird, but the first thing you need to know is that I’m not So—”
“Sarah!?” Courtney threw down the piping bag and launched over the counter. “We’re closed,” she shouted at the other two milling customers before tackling me.
I shrieked—suddenly finding myself with one hundred twenty pounds’ worth of baker while wobbling in Sue’s impractical high heels. I lost the battle.
Screaming, we both went down like Jenga.
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, two angry customers were out on the street, the closed sign was hanging in the window, and we were sitting at one of her cute, tiny little café-style tables with that same tray of cupcakes between us.
“I can’t believe you knew it was me,” I mumbled around a mouthful of confectionary.
Courtney gave me a look. “You think I don’t know my best friend when she’s standing right in front of me? Honestly, it always baffled me that people couldn’t tell you and Sue apart. Never had there ever been two people who were more different.”
I just nodded.
Courtney looked great. It had been ten years since I saw her, but no one told her velvety smooth skin, blemish-free cheeks, killer figure, and long, flour-dusted locks.
“I... erm... Can I take it as a good sign that you said best friend, and not former best friend?” I tried for a smile. “Meaning that our best-friends-forever, never-tell-a-soul-our-secrets pact is still in effect?”
She gave me another look. “Sarah, of course we’re still friends, and of course you can still tell me anything and I’ll keep my mouth shut but...” Her brows crumpled. “We’re not in high school anymore, so if you’re invoking the pact, I’m guessing what you have to say is pretty bad.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Yeah, it’s pretty bad. It’s as bad as it gets.”
I told her everything. Everything from Sue showing up at my apartment in Willingsworth, to the accident that killed her, to lying to Dan, to lying to the police, to lying to Sue’s husbands and child, and all the lies in between.
When I finished, I had to pat myself on the back—because I big-time got her to top her slack-jawed, bug-eyed shock from earlier with the crater-faced one before me.
“Sarah!”
“I know,” I cried, clapping my hands over my face. “I know, I know, I know!”
“How— How— How?!” she settled on. “How could you just throw your twin sister off a fucking cliff?!”
“Trust me, that wasn’t the hard part.” I slammed my hand on the table.
“I’ve been wanting to throw that bitch off a cliff since I was eight years old, and when I walked through the door and discovered she planned to surprise me with Micah, Rhodes, and Alex—jumping on another chance to hurt me while our mother lay upstairs dying? ”
Hatred curled my hands into fists. “I wanted to throw her off twice.”
“Okay... okay, yeah,” she whispered. “That is brutally cruel—even for Sue. But how in the world are you passing yourself off as Sue to her husbands? They’ve been dating, living with, and raising a child with her for ten years!”
“I know! I have no idea how I’m doing it other than that those relationships are strained to snap, Court. They want Sue out of their lives for good, so they’re not looking too hard at me or why I’m acting strange.” I flicked away. “They’re barely looking at me at all.”
I felt her eyes on me. “And that hurts your feelings, doesn’t it.”
She said it like a question, but it wasn’t one. Courtney was always able to see right through me.
“Yes, it does.” My eyes stung. “You know what a massive crush I had on those guys my entire freshman year. And then after they graduated, I virtually stalked everything they did and everywhere they went. If there was anything I wanted as much as Yale, it was to be in Micah’s, Rhodes’s, and Alex’s orbit,” I said.
“Now I finally am, and they look at me like bear shit on the welcome mat. And speaking of bears, Alex locked me outside with one this morning.”
“Excuse me?!”
“Yep. No exaggeration. He saw the fucking bear behind me, locked the door, and walked away.”
She gaped at me, speechless.
“I was fine,” I quickly added. “The bear didn’t try to come after me when I hurried my butt off the porch and to the front door, but the look in Alex’s eyes when he did it...”
I tossed my head. “He truly despises Sue. The only thing I can’t figure out is how she knew to go for them in the first place. I never told Sue how I felt about those guys. I wasn’t an idiot.”
“Uhhh....”
“Huh?” I raised my head, locking eyes with her cringe. “What? What is it?”
“Babe, I... I think I know how she figured those three were the perfect targets of your emotional annihilation.”
“What?” I sat up straight. “How?”
Courtney sighed. Picking up her own cupcake, she chomped a big bite.
“After that day in the auditorium—when you just suddenly disappeared and I didn’t have a clue what happened other than that you were expelled.
After that day, I kept going to your house almost every day for weeks, trying to get in to see your mother to ask what happened to you.
“At first, the staff let me in but told me I had to wait in the front hall until your mother was ready to receive me,” she mocked, putting on all the pompous airs that word deserved. “Hint: she never came down.
“Eventually, she must’ve told the staff to stop opening the door for me, because they started leaving me on the welcome mat—banging and shouting for someone to let me in.
” She blew out a breath. “Well, one day, the door flew open and your mother was there—looking down on me like I was the most disgusting, filthy piece of trash she’d ever seen. ”
Court’s eyes glazed. “She told me she had no daughter by the name of Sarang Kim—”
The sentence cut me like a knife.
“—but if she was the mother of the person I was referring to, she must’ve lost said daughter to the influence of vulgar, insolent little sluts like me.”
It was my turn for my jaw to drop. “She said that?! Oh, Court, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said quickly.
It wasn’t fine. All these years later, I could hear in her voice that it was not fine.
“Sarah, I’m telling you this because while your mom was eviscerating me on the welcome mat, I looked over her shoulder and saw your sister, Sue, crossing the hall with your journal in her hands.” She tapped the table. “Remember the one you always used to carry in high school? The one—”
“—that had all my embarrassing, blubbering essays on my feelings for Micah, Rhodes, and Alex,” I choked out. “Along with the business card Rhodes gave me when we promised to make a date for my eighteenth birthday.
“She took my journal.” My voice was flat. Dead. “My private thoughts and feelings. She stole it and weaponized it—doing everything she could to hurt me even after I was gone.”
A cold hand slipped into mine, squeezing tightly. “How did she even get it?”
“Omma didn’t let me pack my things before she threw me out,” I said to a pink-and-green-painted wall. “She didn’t let me take anything but the car, and that was only because the car would get me the fuck out of her face quicker.
“The journal was still upstairs in my bedroom, but I had it hidden in the air vent to keep it from Sue’s grubby, nosy hands. With me not there to stop her, she must’ve snooped around until she found it.”
“I’m so sorry, babe.”
I groaned, sinking down in the chair. “I don’t want to talk about that monster anymore.
I came because I needed to tell someone the truth.
.. and because I need someone to tell me the truth.
” I leaned over, grasping both her hands.
“Is what I’m doing insane? Should I just come clean to everyone and hope they’ll understand? ”
She was shaking her head before I finished. “No, Sarah. That is exactly what the fuck you don’t do. If you come clean now, it’ll spectacularly blow up in your face, and I’m not sitting on my ass without a clue while my best friend gets chased out of my life for the second time.”
I blinked at her. Courtney was the wilder one of the two of us, but she was also the voice of reason. If anyone was going to give me the push to stop the lies, I thought it would be her. “But, how can you be sure telling the truth will blow up in my face?”
“Because you just told me that Sue’s husbands hate her,” she dropped. “They hate her for being the lying, scheming, manipulative bitch that we know she’s been for the last ten years. So what happens when the sister that Sue and Omma hid pulls a surprise, sucker! on them?
“They’re not going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
They’re just going to think Omma gave birth to two lying, scheming bitches, and how will you convince them they’re wrong?
” She gave me a wry look. “Upon meeting them again for the second time in ten years, the first thing you did... was lie. Not a ringing endorsement of your character.”
“But I had to!” I threw out my hands. “I didn’t want to lie to them, but Davis was standing right there. The fucker just wouldn’t leave! How could I tell them the truth in front of a cop?”
“Sarah, I know that,” she soothed. “I know you had good reason to lie, and I know that you’re the best person ever, but they don’t. You’re nothing but a stranger to them. A stranger who threw their dead wife off a cliff, then moved into her bedroom.”