MY TWIN, MY IMPOSTER

PEARLINE ♠️ Carson’s arm was heavy across my waist when I woke, the way it always was, like some part of him refused to let go even in his sleep. I lay there a second before I moved. Gray morning light through the blinds. Nora’s feet hitting the floor down the hall, she never crept anywhere, my daughter. “You’re thinking too loud,” Carson mumbled into my shoulder. “I haven’t said a word.” “You don’t have to.” He pulled me closer, my back against his chest, his heartbeat slow and even against my spine. “Fabric order?” “Fabric order.” I almost laughed. “Portugal sent the wrong weight on the spring silk. For the third time.” “Fire them.” Carson said “I’m not firing an entire mill over a shipping error.” “You could. You’re powerful now. People fear you.” He said it into my hair, half asleep, and I laughed for real that time, my hand finding his against my stomach. Six years ago I didn’t have a mill in Portugal, or a bedroom this quiet, or a man who looked at my sketches before he looked at my bank account, which told me everything about him before he ever said a word. Nora appeared in the doorway, hair sticking up on one side, dragging her stuffed rabbit by one ear. “Mommy. Rabbit needs breakfast too.” “Does Rabbit eat pancakes?” “Rabbit eats everything.” She said it was like I was slow to ask. She climbed onto the bed between us, rabbit first, and for a minute the three of us just existed there together, tangled in warm sheets, nothing outside that door mattering at all. I got up first. I always did, some habit from the early years, when mornings were the only quiet hours before the phone started ringing. Downstairs when I started making breakfast I burned the first pancake the way I always did and fed it to the rabbit, and Nora shrieked with laughter loud enough that Carson came down still buttoning his shirt, smiling at both of us like he couldn’t believe his morning looked like this. My phone lit up on the counter. Fourteen messages. I scrolled past most of it until I hit the one from Lily, sent at 6:02 a.m. “We need to talk about the party. Call me.” No good morning. Just seven words with an edge on them I could hear even through text. “Everything okay?” Carson asked, pouring Nora’s juice. “Lily.” I turned the phone face down. “It’s fine.” “It’s always fine with you two right up until it’s not.” I didn’t argue, because it was true. By ten in the morning I had to go to my shop, then I resumed work early and I was standing over a worktable with three seamstresses and a bolt of the wrong-weight silk. Denise found me an hour later, coffee in each hand. “You look like you haven’t slept.” “I slept fine.” “You look like you haven’t slept.” She set the coffee down anyway. Denise had been with me since year two, back when the company was just the two of us and a shared conviction that we were building something worth the exhaustion. “Lily?” “How did you…” “You get a specific face.” She picked up a swatch of silk, checked the weight against the light. “You always do this. You brace for her and then you let her in anyway.” I didn’t have an answer, mostly because it was true, and because the truth of it went back further than either of us had time for that morning. Lily and I were born nine minutes apart, and somewhere in those nine minutes the whole shape of our lives got decided, who got called the talented one, who got asked and “what about you, sweetheart” at every birthday, who built something with her own hands while the other waited for someone to hand her something worth having. I loved my sister. I want that clear, whatever comes after it. I loved her the exact, uncomplicated way you love someone who shared a womb with you, who held your hand crossing every street of your childhood. I called her back at noon. Then she picked up and said… “You’re late,” she said, by way of hello. “I was working, Lily.” “Right. Of course you were.” A pause, the kind she was good at, designed to make you fill the silence with an apology you didn’t owe. “Can we meet? Face to face. Not like this.” “I have the store until six.” “After, then. We’ll drive somewhere, get out of that stuffy studio.” Her voice softened. “Please, Pearl. Feels like we haven’t actually talked in weeks.” “Fine. Six-fifteen.” “Perfect.” A beat, and then, almost offhand, “Random question, you still keep your passport in that safe in your closet? I’ve been updating my own beneficiary forms and realized I don’t actually know where you keep anything important. If something ever happened to you, I wouldn’t even know where to look.” “Same place it’s always been. Why?” “No reason. Twin-sister paranoia.” She laughed, light, and I laughed too, and neither of us thought anything more of it. I said yes to the drive. Of course I said yes. She was my twin, and it was raining lightly outside the studio windows by then, gray and soft, the kind of rain that doesn’t feel like a warning at all. I had no way of knowing, saying yes to that drive, that I was agreeing to the last ordinary conversation my sister and I would ever have. or that somewhere behind her eyes, a question about a passport and a safe wasn’t really about a passport at all.