The Girl in the Mirror(46)



“No!” I protest, although, of course, he’s right. After my initial relief at discovering Tarquin is still a mute, my fear of him has returned. The kid might not be able to spill the beans, but I don’t know how to act around him.

“Hey, it’s okay, I understand, beautiful,” Adam says. “I was the same when Helen died. Looking at this kid you’re supposed to love, but you’re in too much pain. I could see it on your face yesterday. You couldn’t connect with him. Like you’d forgotten how to be his mum.”

I must look as aghast as I feel, because his voice softens. “Babe, I don’t mean to hurt you,” he says. “Let’s take things slow with Tarq. I don’t want him on Bathsheba anyway after what happened. It feels dangerous. Will you be okay if I leave you on your own for a bit? I’ll drop the laundry at the laundrette and pick up some more food. I can get Daniel to come round.”

“Yes!” I say. “I mean, no! Yes, I’m okay, and no, no need to send Daniel.”

The doctor has to keep away from my body. He can’t press his stethoscope against my chest. I can imagine his face as he moves the instrument from my left breast to my right. It’s the face every doctor in my life has made after listening to my chest. Not so much surprise as pleasure at the chance to dredge up some phrases they haven’t used since medical school. “Dextrocardia! Latin for ‘right heart,’” they announce, each seeming sure I won’t have heard the word before.

Daniel can keep away. I want nothing more than to be alone.

Adam reaches for the sheet and rips it back. I feel naked as his eyes sweep down my body. I still look very different from either Iris or Summer after my ordeal at sea. My skin is tanned and coarse. He presses his face against my abdomen, flatter than it’s ever been. I wait for him to comment on my weight loss. Grief, honey, it’s the grief.

Instead, he murmurs into my belly. “How are you, Rosebud?” he says. “Keep safe, darling.”

Does he have a name for Summer’s navel? My face must show my surprise, but he doesn’t see. He turns away and I hear his bouncy tread on the ladder to the pilothouse.

Rosebud?

I get it. He wasn’t talking to me. Rosebud is their fetus nickname. I just about throw up on the floor.

Adam’s barely stepped off the yacht before I’m ferreting in Summer’s drawers for her iPhone. I find it in a jewelry case along with a bunch of necklaces and earrings, all rose gold. Adam is taking this rose obsession too far. The jewelry, the rose-pink lingerie, and now a rosy name for the fetus. It’s too much.

He loves Summer. He went straight from the rough sex to commiserating with her grief and offering to do the laundry and shopping. He was tender and thoughtful. If he realizes that his Summer Rose doesn’t like the sexyrape anymore, he’ll stop. The problem is, I can’t be too different from the Summer he knew before.

The phone’s dead, but I charge it at Bathsheba’s mains power outlet while I shower.

Naked in the stateroom, I almost reach for my own clothes. I’d better not make that mistake. I empty my belongings—clothes, books, makeup, my phone—from the stateroom drawers and jam them into my suitcase, and then I throw on the plainest of Summer’s underwear and a modest linen shift. Best to be understated at first. I move Summer’s other clothes back to the stateroom drawers. I will get to wear all of them in time.

I turn Summer’s iPhone on, and the passcode screen blinks at me, prompting me to enter four digits. Summer will have used something easy for her to remember, but all the same, there are too many possibilities for me to start trying numbers at random. I can’t afford to get locked out of her phone.

There’s Adam’s birthday, Tarquin’s birthday—I don’t even know it; I must find out how old he is. Our own birthday.

Wait. This is the same phone Summer had before she met Adam, and she’s not the type to update her passcode.

She won’t use her birthday, not when she shares it with me. She always thinks somebody wants to hack her boring phone. As if I would ever have been interested in doing that.

On a whim I key in 7673, and the phone opens up to me.

It’s one of those twin moments that Ben always wants me to explain. But I can’t explain what it’s like to be a twin, just as he can never explain what it’s like not to be. It’s always been this way. It’s all I know.

It didn’t feel like a guess. It’s as if I remembered. My passcode is Rose.



Adam will be gone at least a couple of hours. I charge the phone and the iPad, which has the same passcode. I’m too cautious to write a list of things I need to memorize, but I start by searching my emails for “birthday.”

Adam will be thirty on the sixth of June, and Tarquin turned two in late January. I remember that it’s a badge of honor among mothers to know your kid’s age in months right up till he leaves high school, so I memorize the phrase, “Tarky’s twenty-six and a half months.” God, I sound nauseatingly like a mother. Like Summer.

The next question will be, “And how far along are you?” That’s a harder one to answer. I’ve known enough pregnant women to know the correct answer is always given in weeks, as though anyone gives a shit.

Adam’s had a kid before, so maybe he knows pregnancy dating backward and forward. On the other hand, Adam’s pretty vague about everything, even by man standards.

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