Chapter 6
Rowan was born four minutes before me and never let me forget it.
“Four minutes,” she’d say, grinning, whenever I tried to pull rank on anything — who got the front seat, who picked the movie, who spoke first when we met someone new.
“I’ve got four minutes of life experience on you, Em.
Respect your elders.” This was a joke that had stopped being funny around age twelve and continued being said until age thirty, because Rowan operated on the principle that persistence was funnier than originality.
We were identical in the technical sense — same dark brown hair, same sharp jawline, same hazel eyes that went green in certain light and brown in others.
Our mother used to say we were the same person poured into two glasses, which was the kind of thing that sounds poetic until you realize it means that one of you will always feel like there isn’t enough to go around.
Rowan got the confidence. I got the caution.
She got the volume. I got the observation.
She walked into rooms the way Cade did — with the assumption that the room had been waiting for her — and I walked into rooms the way I wrote: carefully, watching for the exit.
The differences showed up in the margins.
Rowan wore her hair down and loose, dark waves over one shoulder, like a shampoo commercial that had learned to talk.
I wore mine pulled back because it was practical and because I’d spent enough years being interchangeable with another person to want at least this one visual distinction.
Rowan dressed like someone who expected to be photographed.
I dressed like someone who expected to be left alone.
She wore the face we shared louder — bigger earrings, brighter lipstick, a confidence in her own beauty that I’d never quite managed, because beauty felt like something that happened to me, not something I did on purpose.
She stayed in Nashville when I married Cade.
This was convenient for everyone — Rowan worked in sports media, doing pre-game segments and player profiles for a local network affiliate, and Nashville was a good market for a woman who was pretty and sharp and could talk about zone defense without condescension.
She was at every home game. She was at every team event.
She was, in the vocabulary of the hockey world, “family” — the sister-in-law who showed up with wine and knew everyone’s name and made the other wives laugh and never seemed like she was performing, which was the thing I envied most, because for me it was always a performance.
The barbecue was in May, a year and a half into the marriage.
Cade hosted it at the house — the actual house, the one we’d moved into six months after the wedding because the downtown condo didn’t have a yard and Cade wanted a yard for reasons he couldn’t articulate but felt strongly about, the way he felt strongly about all things he couldn’t articulate.
The house was in a neighborhood called Belle Meade, which was the kind of Nashville neighborhood where the driveways were long and the opinions were short and everyone had a cleaning service and a lawn service and a life that looked exactly the way it was supposed to look from the outside.
I’d been planning the barbecue for a week.
This was my job — the planning, the organizing, the behind-the-scenes machinery that made Cade Calloway’s social life look effortless.
I’d chosen the caterer, hired the bartender, arranged the outdoor seating, selected the playlist, coordinated with the team’s PR department to make sure no one brought journalists without clearance, and sent a follow-up text to every invitee confirming dietary restrictions.
I’d done all of this while Cade was at practice, because that was when I did most of my work — in the gaps between his life, in the margins of his schedule, in the quiet hours when his world paused long enough for me to run it.
Rowan arrived early. She always arrived early to Cade’s events, which I’d attributed to enthusiasm rather than anything else, because what else would it be?
My twin sister, arriving early to help me set up, bringing a bottle of wine and a bag of ice and the easy energy of a woman who was comfortable in this house.
She knew where the serving trays were. She knew which drawer held the bottle opener.
She knew the WiFi password and the garage code and the name of the dog next door who barked every time someone pulled into the driveway.
I watched her move through my kitchen with the familiarity of someone who spent more time there than I’d realized.
“You rearranged the pantry,” she said, reaching for a serving bowl on the second shelf.
“Two weeks ago.”
“It’s better. The old layout didn’t make sense.”
She was right. The old layout hadn’t made sense.
But the fact that Rowan had noticed the change meant Rowan had been in the pantry recently enough to register a difference, and I filed this away the way I filed everything — quietly, neatly, in the part of my brain that collected details I didn’t want to examine.
Cade came home from practice at four. He walked in through the back door with his hair wet from the locker room shower and the energy of a man who has just spent two hours doing the thing his body was built for.
He kissed me on the forehead — a quick, automatic kiss, the kind of kiss that is more habit than intention — and then he saw Rowan and his face did something.
Not a lot. A small thing. A shift in the wattage, like a lamp being turned from medium to bright.
He smiled at her with the full version of his face, the one I used to get in the bar in Nashville when I was twenty-four and holding a beer I didn’t want, and she smiled back with the same full version of our shared face, and I stood between them holding a stack of napkins and felt, for the first time, the specific temperature of being the wrong twin in the room.
“Ro, you’re early,” he said.
“I’m always early.”
“She brought ice,” I said, because someone needed to say something and the silence was getting architectural.
“We needed ice,” Cade said, which was true, and then he went upstairs to change, and Rowan went back to arranging the serving trays, and I stood in my kitchen with the napkins and the filed-away detail and the small, specific certainty that something was happening that I was choosing not to see.
The barbecue was fine. The barbecue was always fine.
Thirty teammates and their wives and girlfriends, the coaching staff, a few front-office people, the neighbors who came because Cade had invited them with the careless generosity of a man who assumes everyone wants to be near him.
I moved through the event the way I always moved — filling drinks, busing plates, having the same conversation seven times about the upcoming playoff series and whether the power play needed restructuring and wasn’t it just so nice that Cade hosted these things?
It was so nice. I was so nice. The nice wife of the nice hockey player in the nice house in Belle Meade with the nice yard and the nice caterer and the nice wine and the nice sister-in-law who stood by the grill with my husband and laughed at something I couldn’t hear.
I watched them. I told myself I wasn’t watching them. I was just aware of them the way you’re aware of weather — a presence at the edge of perception, constant and unmeasurable.
Rowan touched his arm when she talked. This was not new — Rowan was a toucher, always had been, the kind of person whose hands were part of her vocabulary — but the specific way she touched Cade’s arm was different from the way she touched the goalie’s shoulder or the coach’s wife’s hand.
She touched Cade’s arm the way you touch something that belongs to you.
Lightly. Possessively. With the casual certainty of someone who has touched it before, in private, and is calibrating how much of that familiarity she can show in public.
He didn’t move away. That was the detail that stuck.
When his teammates’ wives touched his arm he shifted — not obviously, not rudely, just a small recalibration of personal space, the way a public figure manages the boundary between friendly and too-close.
With Rowan, he didn’t shift. He leaned in.
A centimeter, maybe less. Enough that I noticed. Not enough that anyone else would.
I refilled someone’s wine glass. I laughed at someone’s joke.
I was a woman at a party doing the things women at parties do, and no one in that yard full of people could have told you that I was standing in my own house watching my husband lean one centimeter toward my sister and feeling the ground shift beneath my feet like a fault line that had been waiting for exactly this much pressure to crack.
Rowan knew his coffee order. I noticed this at a team brunch the following weekend — she’d walked into the restaurant and set a to-go cup in front of Cade without asking, and he’d picked it up and drank from it without looking, and the casualness of the exchange was the thing that landed.
Not the coffee. The not-looking. The way his hand found the cup the way it found a puck on the ice — by instinct, by muscle memory, by the practiced certainty of a thing done so many times it no longer required thought.
I drank my own coffee — black, which I’d started drinking black in my MFA days because the hallway coffee machine didn’t have cream and I’d adapted — and I said nothing.