The Identicals(78)

Harper raises her glass and touches it to Ramsay’s. The night is off and running.



Ramsay orders for both of them: duck confit dumplings, the tuna martini with crème fra?che and wasabi tobiko, the sixty-second steak topped with a fried quail egg, the stir-fried salt-and-pepper lobster.

“And another round of martinis!” Ramsay says.

The bartender, a pert and pretty blonde with a posh English accent, gives Ramsay and Harper a smile. “I’m glad to see you two back in here,” she says. “I’ve missed you.”

“Oh,” Harper says. “I’m not…”

“Thank you, Jo,” Ramsay says. “We’ve missed you, too.”



With the third martini—and three will be it, Harper decides, then she’ll switch to water—she can finally talk to Ramsay about the things she’s afraid to talk to him about during the daylight hours.

“Do you miss my sister?” Harper asks.

“I do and I don’t,” Ramsay says. “I’m a fixer by nature. I tried and tried with Tabitha, but I couldn’t help her. She wouldn’t let me.”

Harper nods. “She was born ninety seconds before me. She has always been independent and self-sufficient. Whereas I always needed help.”

“So who is your support?” Ramsay asks.

How is Harper to answer that question?

“In recent years, my love life has been complicated,” Harper says, and she shakes her head at the understatement. “I had a lover, a married lover.”

“Ahh,” Ramsay says.

“His name is Reed Zimmer,” Harper says. It feels so wonderful to say his name out loud that tears stand in her eyes. “He’s a fixer, too. A doctor. He was my father’s doctor, so he took care of my father, and by association he took care of me. He has a quiet authority that made me feel safe when I was with him. Which of course was foolish because I was the opposite of safe. He belonged to someone else. His wife, Sadie. And I fell into the trap that all mistresses fall into: I believed Sadie didn’t matter. I believed he would leave her for me eventually.”

“But he didn’t?” Ramsay says.

“Sadie found out about us,” Harper says. “She caught us together on the night my father died, and then a few days later she made a scene at Billy’s funeral. Reed sent me a text message asking me not to contact him for a while.” Harper stares into the bottom of her martini glass. Truth serum. She never talks this much—but then again, whom does she have to confide in? Only Ramsay, here and now. “I heard from other sources that he moved out. I heard he took a leave of absence from the hospital. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. I don’t know if he’s still on the Vineyard or if he’s walking around out in the real world. I don’t know if he’s looking for me or looking for himself. I feel guilty about what I did to Sadie, but I feel more guilty about what I did to Reed. Because I believe he’s a good, true person, and yet somehow I led him astray. I stained his character, shredded his integrity. The night Sadie caught us, I asked him to meet me. He didn’t want to, but I begged him.”

“Well, your father had just died,” Ramsay says. “Right?”‘

Harper spins her martini glass. “I mess up whatever I do,” she says. “It’s like a curse. When our parents divorced, and I got to go with Billy, I thought I’d won some kind of contest. But it turns out I’m a loser, through and through.”

“You don’t believe that,” Ramsay says.

“I do, Tabitha does, and I think even my mother does. And my father, right before he died, turned to me and said, I’m sorry, kiddo. At first I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I figured it out. He was sorry I was the way I was. He was sorry he couldn’t help me.”

“Harper, come on,” Ramsay says. “You are a beautiful, intelligent woman. Every bit as intriguing as your sister but, if I may say so, way more fun.”

“So much fun that I barely graduated from Tulane,” Harper says. “So much fun that while I was cocktail waitressing at this place in Edgartown called Dahlia’s, I agreed to deliver a ‘package’ for a guy everyone knew was a drug dealer. I got arrested, ratted him out, brought down the whole operation.”

Ramsay’s eyes grew wide behind his glasses. “You’re kidding.”

“But that’s not the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Harper says. “And sleeping with Dr. Zimmer isn’t the worst thing, either.”

“Do I dare ask?” Ramsay says.

Harper studied him. “Tabitha never told you why we don’t speak? She never hinted?”

“Never,” Ramsay says. His face is earnest, but Harper can’t believe that Tabitha lived with someone for so long and didn’t tell him about the night Julian died.

“Well,” Harper says. She’s not sure what to say. She almost wishes Tabitha had given her version of the story so that Harper could confirm or deny. She drains the last sip of her martini. What she really wants is a shot of J?ger. “Tabitha blames me for Julian’s death.”

Ramsay shakes his head like he’s trying to clear water from his ears. “What?” he says. “Why? Why would she do that?”

But this is beyond Harper’s ability to answer. She slides off her bar stool and stares at him, willing him to understand that she did not smother Julian with a blanket or drown him in the bathtub or shake him because he wouldn’t stop crying. Harper should explain the events of that day, that night—but even now, fourteen years later, it’s too painful to revisit.