MY TWIN, MY IMPOSTER

Chapter 3: What she wanted

LILY ♠️

The doctor’s voice reached me before I saw his face, low, careful, the voice they use when they’re about to hand you something heavy and don’t want to drop it on the way.

“She’s stable. No skull fracture, no internal bleeding, which is more than we hoped for given the impact.”

He glanced at his chart, then back at me, sitting there in my own hospital gown with gauze taped above one eyebrow.

“But there’s swelling around the hippocampus. It’s affecting memory formation and retrieval. Right now she doesn’t know her name. Doesn’t recognize her own face in a mirror. It could resolve in days. It could take much longer. There’s no way to know yet.”

I sat very still and let the words land.

She doesn’t know her name.

Something moved through me that I didn’t have a clean word for.

Not relief exactly. Not joy exactly. Something underneath both of those, something I’d spent twenty-nine years learning to keep folded small and quiet in the back of my chest. My pulse picked up. My hands went still in my lap, and that stillness took real effort, the kind of effort my face couldn’t afford to show.

“Oh my god,” I said, and even I couldn’t tell anymore where the performance ended and the truth began. “Is she going to be okay?”

“We’re optimistic. The brain has remarkable capacity to heal itself. But I need to ask you some questions for her chart, if you’re up for it.”

I was up for it. I had been, I realized somewhere underneath the shock, waiting my whole life for a version of this question without even knowing it was coming.

My phone buzzed on the tray table beside the bed before he’d finished writing. “DENISE,” the screen read. I stared at it a second too long.

“You can take that,” the doctor said, already turning to go. “I’ll come back in twenty minutes.”

I answered on the fourth ring, the way Pearline always let calls sit just long enough to look busy without looking rude.

“Pearline, thank god.” Denise’s voice came fast, worried, the voice of someone who’d heard secondhand and panicked properly on the drive over. “I’m on my way to the hospital. Are you okay? What happened? Someone said a wreck, someone said Lily was with you…”

“I’m fine.” The words came out steadier than I expected, warm in the exact places Pearline’s voice always went warm. “Banged up. Lily’s… she’s stable. It’s going to be a long road, but she’s stable.”

“Thank god.” A breath on the other end, shaky with relief. “Do you need me to come? I can push the fitting, I can push everything, just tell me what you need.”

“No.” I said too fast. I heard it land wrong even as it left my mouth, and I softened it, slower this time. “No, stay at the studio. There’s nothing you can do here. I just need, a minute. To process.”

“Okay.” A pause. “Pearline, you sound different.”

My stomach dropped an inch. “I just survived a car accident, Denise.”

“Right. Of course. I’m sorry.” Another pause, shorter this time, and I could hear her deciding to let it go, the way you let things go with someone you trust completely. “I’ll hold everything down here. Call me the second you need anything. I mean it.”

“I know you will.” I said it the way Pearline would have said it, warm and certain, and hung up before my voice could give anything else away.

I sat with the phone in my lap a long moment, staring at the wall, my own heartbeat loud in my ears. Denise had known Pearline for eight years. She’d know her laugh, her exact turns of phrase, the small habits nobody else ever noticed. I had just gotten past her on nothing but a good impression and pure luck, and something cold slid down my spine at how close that call had come to going wrong.

“You sound different.”

I would need to be better than that. Starting now.

The nurse who came to confirm my own information a few minutes later had tired eyes and a clipboard and a shift that had clearly gone on six hours too long already.

“Ma’am, I need your name for our records.”

My mouth opened. For one full second nothing came out of it at all, my tongue heavy behind my teeth, my own pulse loud in my ears like something underwater.

Down the hall, through the gap in a curtain that didn’t quite reach the wall, I could see them wheeling a second gurney past, my sister’s face slack and unfamiliar in a way it had never once been unfamiliar to me in twenty-nine years. A woman with no idea yet that she’d lost the only thing that had ever separated her from me.

“Ma’am?” The pen tapped once against the clipboard.

“Pearline.” The word left me before I’d fully decided to say it, my voice catching on the second syllable, a small stumble I covered by clearing my throat. “Pearline Dallas.”

She didn’t look up. Didn’t pause. Wrote it down in the same flat, tired scrawl she’d probably used forty times that shift, and reached for a plastic bracelet off the cart.

The little machine hummed. Letters printed onto the band in real time. PEARLINE DALLAS. I watched my own wrist disappear under it and felt something settle into place in my chest, cold and enormous, like a door closing somewhere very far away.

An hour later, a different doctor saw me in the hallway outside my sister’s new room, a man I recognized, vaguely, from some benefit dinner years ago. Whitfield, the family’s old physician. He was staring at a printout in his hand like it had personally betrayed him.

“Mrs. Dallas.” He said the name carefully, testing it. “Do you have a moment?”

I did. I had all the moments in the world, suddenly, stretching out ahead of me in a shape I hadn’t let myself imagine until exactly one hour and one phone call ago, a life that had always technically belonged to my sister, sitting there now, unclaimed, in a body no one but me and one frightened doctor would ever know had switched hands.

“Of course, Doctor,” I said, and smiled the way Pearline smiled, warm and a little tired, a woman who had just survived something terrible and had no idea yet how much more terrible it was about to become for someone else.