MY TWIN, MY IMPOSTER

Chapter 2: The Wreck

PEARLINE ♠️

Lily was waiting outside the store at six-fifteen, arms crossed against the cold, hair already damp from standing in the drizzle instead of waiting inside like I’d told her to.

“You could’ve come in,” I said, unlocking the car.

“I like the rain.” No, she doesn’t like the rain. She didn’t, not really, she just liked making a point out of small discomforts. She got in, seatbelt clicking, and I pulled into traffic before either of us said much else.

For a few minutes it was easy. She told me about a man from her gym, somewhere he wanted to take her in the spring. Then, the way I knew she would eventually, she brought up the party.

“I had to hear about the venue from your assistant, Pearline. Your assistant.”

“It’s Carson’s surprise. That’s the whole point of a surprise.”

“I’m your sister. I should’ve at least…”

“You’ll be there. Head table, front and center. What more do you want from me?” Those words came out sharper than I meant it to. I saw her jaw go tight, and some tired part of me wanted to take it back immediately.

“Nothing,” she said, quiet now, staring out the window. “Forget I said anything.”

“Lily…”

“Just drive, Pearline.”

I drove. The silence between us had teeth in it, nothing like the comfortable kind we used to have as kids, curled up on one bed reading the same book at the same time.

“Can I ask you something,” she said, after a while, voice small. “If something happened to me, an accident, anything, would you know what to do? Would Carson even know where to find me if it wasn’t you who needed finding?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know. Been thinking about it lately.” She shrugged, too casual for the weight of it, and looked back out at the rain.

I almost said sorry, for snapping earlier. The word sat right at the back of my throat, ready, and that was when my phone buzzed against the console, Carson’s name lighting the screen, and some instinct older than good sense dropped my eyes to it instead of the road.

“Can’t wait for tonight, love y…”

I didn’t read the rest.

The headlights hit the edge of my vision like a slap. Wrong lane. Wrong angle. Too close, too fast, the wet road giving the other car’s tires nothing to hold onto as it swung wide across the yellow line, straight at us.

My hands wrenched the wheel before my brain caught up to what my body already understood. I heard myself make a sound, not a word, not a scream, something with no time to finish becoming either.

Then the world came apart.

The windshield didn’t shatter so much as scream, glass tearing loose in a thousand small bright pieces that caught the headlights on their way toward my face. My head snapped sideways. The seatbelt bit so hard across my chest that for one endless second I couldn’t get a single breath back into my lungs, just my ribs locked tight, my mouth open on nothing, the horn of the other car still blaring somewhere behind us, already useless, already too late to matter.

The car left the road.

There was no floor anymore. No ceiling. My stomach dropped somewhere it wasn’t built to go and my body slammed sideways,to the door, then the roof, then nothing, weightless, spinning, the whole world rolling end over end while rain and glass and the stink of burning rubber fought for space inside my skull at once. Something metal shrieked against something else metal, high and wrong, a sound with no business existing.

Lily.

My hand found hers in the dark without me deciding it should, the same reflex that had gripped hands crossing streets our whole childhood, weathering thunderstorms under one blanket. Her fingers closed around mine, tight, immediate.

I heard her make a sound I’d never heard her make before. Sharp. Wordless. Cut off halfway.

The car hit the ditch and stopped all at once, hard enough that my teeth cracked together, and then, nothing. No horn. No scream. Just the tick of a dying engine and rain hissing against upturned metal and my own pulse slamming behind my eyes hard enough to hurt.

I lifted a hand to my cheek without deciding to. It came away dark. I stared at my own fingers, not understanding what I was looking at, my thoughts moving slow and thick like I was trying to think underwater.

Sirens. Far off. Coming closer.

I turned my head. It cost more than it should have, the world tilting and taking its time resettling. Lily hung upside down beside me, blood at her hairline, hair stuck flat against her cheek. Her eyes were already open.

For half a breath I thought I was looking at my own reflection. But her face wasn’t doing what my face was doing. No fear in it. No scramble to understand what had just happened to both of us.

She was still. Watching me. The way you watch something you’re deciding what to do with.

“Lily…” Half a whisper. Half a wet cough.

She didn’t answer. Her grip didn’t loosen, didn’t tighten. Just stayed, steady, while the sirens grew louder and the edges of my vision started closing in, one degree at a time, like someone dimming a room.

I tried to say something else. A name. A question. Nothing came out right, the words dissolving somewhere between my chest and my mouth. Somewhere close, real voices now, not sirens. A car door. Footsteps through standing water. Someone shouting for a kit.

The last thing I registered before the dark swallowed everything was my sister’s face drawing closer through the wreckage, close enough to feel her breath against my cheek, and two words, soft, almost tender, right against my ear.

“Not yet.”

Then nothing. No name. No face. No sister, no husband, no daughter waiting somewhere in a house I could no longer picture.

Just dark, and the sound of my own heart, and a silence with no shape to it at all.