MY TWIN, MY IMPOSTER

Chapter 7: Playing the Part

LILY ♠️

The design meeting started at nine, and by nine-fifteen I understood I was in real trouble.

“We’re looking at the spring silk order,” said a woman named Marta, laying three fabric swatches on the table in front of me like she was dealing cards.

“Cotton mill sent us the wrong weight again. Third time. You said last week you wanted to move the whole order to the backup supplier if it happened again.”

I stared at the swatches. They looked, to me, exactly the same, pale, silky, expensive-looking cloth that told me nothing at all.

“Right,” I said. “Remind me what the backup supplier quoted us.”

Marta’s eyebrows moved, just slightly, the way eyebrows move when someone says something they didn’t expect to have to explain. “Twelve percent higher. You said it was worth it for reliability. You said…” she paused, checking her notes, “…you said, quote, ‘I’d rather pay more and sleep at night than gamble the spring line on a mill that keeps missing deadlines.”

“That still sounds right.” I kept my voice even, warm, the way I imagined Pearline’s voice would sound discussing fabric weight on a normal Tuesday. “Let’s move forward with that.”

“You want me to draft the termination letter to the current mill, or just the order shift?”

I had no idea what the difference was. I had no idea if terminating a mill entirely was a bigger decision than shifting one order, no idea what kind of contract sat underneath any of it, no idea what a wrong answer here might cost the company I supposedly built with my own two hands.

“Just the order shift for now,” I said, guessing, my palms damp under the table where no one could see them. “I want to think about the mill relationship a little longer.”

Marta wrote something down. I couldn’t tell if it was the right answer or not. Nobody in the room reacted like I’d said anything strange, and I let out a breath slowly, carefully, through my nose, the way you breathe when you’ve almost stepped on something sharp and don’t want anyone to notice you flinch.

It went like that for two hours. Question after question I had no real answer to, decisions that apparently mattered enormously to people whose names I was still memorizing, a whole language of the business, margins, unlocks, retention numbers, that Pearline apparently spoke fluently and I was hearing, in any real sense, for the first time in my life.

“You’ve had a rough couple of days,” Marta said gently, near the end, when I’d gone quiet for too long over a question about a fall collection timeline. “We can push some of this if you need more time.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and reached for the excuse the way you reach for a railing on a dark staircase. “It’s just an accident. Some of the details feel foggy still. The doctors said that might happen for a while.”

Every face in the room softened at once. Sympathy, real and immediate, replaced the confusion that had been building for the last hour. Nobody pushed. Nobody asked a follow-up question I couldn’t answer. I watched it happen and understood, with a cold, useful clarity, exactly how much room that single word, accident, was going to buy me, and exactly how quickly I needed to learn everything it was currently covering for.

At home that evening wasn’t any easier.

“You’re up early,” Carson said, finding me in the kitchen at six, already dressed, already exhausted from a night of barely sleeping.

“Couldn’t sleep.” True, at least.

“Nora’s got her reading group at the school today. You usually drive her on Tuesdays.” He said it lightly, pouring coffee, not looking at me directly, and I felt my stomach drop somewhere around my knees.

“Right. Of course.” I had no idea what a reading group was, what time it started, what I was supposed to wear to drop a five-year-old off at something called a reading group. “What time do we need to leave?”

“Same as always. Seven-forty.” He glanced at me, something small and unreadable crossing his face. “You feeling okay? You’ve been a little… I don’t know. Off, since the accident.”

“I’m fine,” I said again, the word wearing smoother with every use, like a coin rubbed thin from being handled too many times. “Just tired. It’s been a lot.”

He nodded, accepting it, the way everyone around me kept accepting it, and something in me both relaxed and tightened at the exact same moment, relaxed because the excuse still worked, tightened because I understood, watching him watch me, that it wouldn’t work forever.

My assistant found me at the office an hour later, a folder tucked under one arm, her expression the particular brand of tired that comes from working for someone who used to make decisions in seconds and now seemed to need five minutes for every single one.

“These need your signature before end of day.” She set the folder on my desk and opened it, fanning out a half dozen documents across the surface. “The manufacturer termination, the new retail partnership terms, the board compensation adjustment, and the licensing renewal for the fall line. All time-sensitive.”

I looked down at the papers. Dense paragraphs, numbers, clauses I had no context for, each one apparently requiring a decision that would either make me look exactly like the woman who built this company or expose me completely as someone who had never once sat in this chair before six days ago.

“I need a minute,” I said.

“They’re due by five.” She said it kindly, not unkindly at all, the way you’d remind someone about a deadline you assumed they already had well in hand. “I can push the licensing renewal if you need more time, but the other three have external parties waiting on responses.”

I stared at the folder after she left, the door clicking shut behind her, the office suddenly very quiet around me.

Four documents. Four decisions. I had no idea which ones would make me look exactly like Pearline Dallas, sharp and certain and fully in command of a company she’d spent a decade building, and no idea which ones, signed wrong, would be the first crack wide enough for someone to finally look through and see exactly who I really was.