Chapter 6 #2
Cade mentioned Rowan’s opinion on his contract negotiation.
This was at dinner, a Tuesday, the two of us eating takeout in the kitchen because I’d been too tired to cook and he’d been too late from practice to care.
He was talking about the new contract his agent was pushing — more years, more money, a no-trade clause that would keep him in Nashville through his prime — and he said, “Rowan thinks the no-trade is a mistake. She says it limits my leverage if the team rebuilds.”
“When did you talk to Rowan about your contract?”
“She texted me about the article in The Athletic. She follows this stuff.”
“I follow this stuff. I manage your schedule and your press and your endorsement deals. I am literally the person who follows this stuff.”
He looked up from his pad thai. Not defensive — confused. Confused, the way a man gets confused when he’s said something perfectly reasonable and the woman across from him has reacted as if he’s said something else entirely. “I know you do. I’m just saying Rowan had an interesting take—”
“On your contract. Which is our contract. Our financial future.”
“Em, it’s not a big deal. She just—”
“I know.” I picked up a piece of chicken with my chopsticks. “You’re right. It’s not a big deal.”
It was a big deal. It was a very big deal.
But I had learned, in eighteen months of marriage, that there were conversations you could win and conversations that turned you into the woman you didn’t want to be — the jealous wife, the suspicious partner, the twin who compared — and this was the second kind.
So I ate my takeout and I said it wasn’t a big deal and I filed the detail with all the other details and I said nothing more about it.
She followed this stuff. My twin sister, the sports media professional, followed the contract negotiations of my husband and texted him her opinions and he valued those opinions enough to bring them to our dinner table.
And I sat across from him with my takeout and my black coffee and my filed-away details and thought: She follows this stuff.
As if following was innocent. As if following was the same as watching from a distance.
The group photo was from the team’s charity gala — different from the one in Chapter 2, a different year, a different dress, the same machine of smiles and handshakes and invisible work.
Someone from the PR department took a photo of the starting lineup with their partners, and when I saw it later on the team’s Instagram, I was on the edge.
Not cropped out — included, technically, my shoulder visible at the far right of the frame.
But Rowan was in the center, next to Cade, her hand on his arm, and she was smiling at the camera with the confidence of a woman who belonged there.
I was smiling too. You could see half my face. Half a smile. Half a person.
I stared at the photo for a long time. I zoomed in on Rowan’s hand on his arm.
I zoomed in on his face, looking for the wattage change, the medium-to-bright.
The photo was too posed to show it — everyone was wearing their public face, the one designed for cameras and posterity.
But Rowan’s hand was there. My half-face was there.
And the composition told a story that no one had written on purpose: the woman in the center and the woman on the edge, wearing the same features, occupying different orbits.
I thought about the twin studies I’d read in college.
How identical twins raised apart develop the same habits, the same preferences, the same tics.
How they marry similar people and choose similar careers and laugh at the same pitch.
The studies were supposed to prove that genetics was destiny, that your DNA wrote the script and you just performed it.
But they never addressed the obvious corollary: if you and your twin are the same person in two bodies, and you both want the same man, which one of you deserves him?
The answer, I was learning, was whoever gets there first. Or whoever stays longest. Or whoever is willing to be the louder version in the room while the quieter one organizes the pantry.
I called Joss that night. It was late — eleven, maybe later, the kind of hour when you call someone because the thought in your head has grown too loud to hold alone.
“I think something is happening,” I said.
“Between who?”
I couldn’t say it. The words were there — between Cade and Rowan, between my husband and my twin sister, between the two people who share my life and my face — but saying them would make them real, and I wasn’t ready for real.
Real would mean confrontation. Real would mean breaking something that couldn’t be unbroken.
Real would mean looking at the woman who shared my face and asking her if she was using it to take my husband.
“Never mind,” I said. “I’m tired.”
“Emory.”
“I’m tired, Joss. That’s all. Goodnight.”
I hung up. I went to bed. Cade was already asleep — he slept the way he played, completely, holding nothing back, his body taking up more than its share of the mattress.
I lay beside him in the dark and listened to him breathe and thought about Rowan’s hand on his arm in the photograph and the coffee cup he picked up without looking and the way his face changed wattage when she walked into a room.
I thought about calling her. My twin. My other half. The person who had shared a womb with me and a childhood with me and a face with me and who was, if the details I’d filed away were what I thought they were, sharing my husband with me.
I didn’t call. What would I say? Are you sleeping with my husband?
The question was a grenade, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to pull the pin.
Because if the answer was no, I was the paranoid twin, the jealous wife, the woman who saw enemies in her own family.
And if the answer was yes, then the person who shared my face had used it to replace me, and that was a kind of betrayal that didn’t have a name — not infidelity, not adultery, something deeper, something cellular.
Something that went all the way down to the womb we’d shared and the DNA we carried and the fundamental promise of twinship, which is: I am you, and you are me, and neither of us would ever.
I lay in the dark and listened to Cade breathe and told myself that I was wrong.
That Rowan was just comfortable. That Cade was just friendly.
That the coffee and the contract texts and the hand on his arm and the full-wattage smile were all just the normal behaviors of a close family, and that I was the one with the problem — the suspicious one, the jealous one, the twin who couldn’t stop comparing and couldn’t stop losing.
I almost convinced myself. That was the worst part. I almost convinced myself because the alternative was unthinkable, and I was twenty-six years old and I didn’t yet know that the unthinkable things are usually the ones that turn out to be true.
Three months later, I would miss a period.
Two months after that, I would sit in a doctor’s office and hear the word pregnant and feel the world rearrange itself around a fact that changed everything.
And nine weeks after that, on a June night in Nashville, I would drive myself to a hospital with cramps that felt like dying and call my husband eleven times while he scored three goals and won a championship and checked his phone and put it back in his pocket.
But I didn’t know any of that yet. I was twenty-six.
I was lying in the dark next to a man I loved.
And my twin sister knew his coffee order and his WiFi password and the inside of his pantry, and I was choosing, with the deliberate, exhausting discipline of a woman who has built her entire life around not seeing, to not see.