The Day I Died Twice Chapter 13

The Day I Died Twice Chapter 13

She looked thinner in the daylight. More fragile. Without the cold mask she’d worn on my porch that night, she just looked like me after a year I hadn’t lived—worn down, hunted, hollowed out by survival.

We stood in the doorway, two identical women, neither of us breathing.

“I rehearsed a speech,” Harriet said finally. “I had it perfect. Now I can’t remember a word of it.”

“Then don’t say it.” I stepped back and held the door wide. “Just come in.”

She crossed the threshold like it might give way beneath her.

We talked for six hours.

She told me everything. The family that bought her, the things they’d done, the years she’d spent learning to read and manipulate dangerous people because it was the only way to stay alive. How she’d finally gotten free at twenty-two by being smarter and colder than the men who owned her. How she’d spent the years after that hunting down the family that had thrown her away—and found me instead. Happy. Loved. Lucky.

How the hatred had been the only thing keeping her warm.

How she’d built the machine to destroy me, brick by patient brick, and how the night before the lake she’d watched old footage of me playing with Mabel and felt the hatred split straight down the middle.

—

“I tried to call it off,” she whispered. “Nathaniel wouldn’t stop. And I told myself it was fate. That you were always going to drown, one way or another, and I’d only sped it up.” Her hands trembled around her tea. “I didn’t know I’d have to live with it. I didn’t know your face was going to follow me for the rest of my life.”

I didn’t tell her the truth—that I had drowned, in a life she didn’t remember, and that her guilt had somehow torn a hole in time and dragged me back to fix it. She’d never believe it. I wasn’t even sure I did.

But I knew this much: in that other life, she’d succeeded, and the guilt had still nearly destroyed her. She’d still tried to stop it. The mercy had been there even when it failed.

Mercy that failed once. Mercy that succeeded this time.

“I’m not going to tell you it’s okay,” I said. “It’s not. You helped a man plan to kill me and turn my daughter’s death into money. I’ll be unpacking that for the rest of my life.”

She flinched, nodded, started to rise. “I understand. I’ll go—”

“Sit down.” My voice cracked like a whip, then gentled. “I’m not finished. I’m also not going to spend the one extra life I’ve been given hating the only person on earth who shares my face. I’ve seen where hate ends, Harriet. I’ve been where it ends.” I reached across the table and took her hand—my hand, her hand, the same hand. “I’d rather try the other thing. The harder thing.”

—

She stared at our joined hands as though they were a miracle she didn’t have the clearance to witness.

“What other thing?” she breathed.

“Family,” I said. “The thing they stole from both of us before we could even talk.”

And for the first time, my sister—my mirror, my murderer, my impossible second chance—cried like the two-year-old who’d been carried out of a hospital and sold while I was carried home and kept.