The Girl in the Mirror(80)

“Where are you taking me?” I ask.

“The river,” she says. “You can get on Bathsheba and leave before dawn.”

Darkness presses in as we leave Wakefield. I watch the last streetlight fade in the rearview mirror.

“Where will you go?” I ask. “After I leave? Will you come back here?”

“Of course,” she says. “I wouldn’t leave Tarky alone all night. But you don’t need to worry yourself about these things, Iris. You’ll have plenty of worries of your own. You can’t step back into your life, you know. I always said you didn’t have a life, but now you really don’t.”

Is she going to let me live? She didn’t bother to tidy up the smashed phones. This gives me hope. She’s not acting like someone who needs to cover up a crime.

But then, she wouldn’t need to. As she said, if she did kill me, there wouldn’t be an investigation.

All she has to do is get rid of the body.

“Summer, let me live,” I say. “I’ll do anything.”

“Iris, you’re my sister! You know me better than that. Don’t judge me by your standards. I said to Adam, once Iris sees the gun, she’ll do whatever I tell her.”

She presses the gun harder against my neck. “Adam wanted to kill you,” she says. “You’re lucky he’s not here. I persuaded him to let you live. Bathsheba is fully laden. You could go halfway round the world without restocking. There’s cash on board, ten thousand American dollars. Enough to tide you over. Make sure you don’t come back, Twinnie. I’m scared of what Adam would do to you.”

“Of course,” I say. I don’t know whether to believe her, but it feels safest to play along. “Bathsheba’s all I ever wanted anyway. I think you’re being generous after what I’ve done.”

Summer gives my shoulder a sisterly squeeze, but she keeps the gun in place. “I knew you’d understand, Twinnie,” she says. “I told Adam we could trust you.”

I tell myself to act grateful. Act relieved. Like maybe I didn’t want to carry on being Summer. Like all I ever wanted was to sail away.

I want to believe her. Summer gets her life back. She gets everything. Adam. Tarquin. She gets—I can hardly bear to think it—she gets Esther. She has to believe I don’t want to come back. She has to believe that I’ll do anything as long as she lets me live. She has to believe that the only thing I want is Bathsheba.

Summer knows I’m selfish, freakish, unmotherly. She knows I disliked Tarquin. She knows that I know I can’t have Adam. She knows I never wanted a baby. So this isn’t so bad, is it? I’ll live the rest of my life with no legal identity, the ghost of Iris Carmichael, but at least I’ll live.



We turn off the main highway onto the dirt road that leads to Carmichael Bridge. I glance in the rearview mirror. Summer is resting back in her seat. She catches my gaze.

“Aren’t you wondering where I hid the dinghy?” she asks.

“I suppose,” I say, although, of course, I’m only thinking about Esther. How to make sure she’s safe. How to keep Summer thinking I don’t care about her. I can’t mention her. If I say anything about her, Summer will know. She’ll know that I can never leave my baby.

“I knew I had to hide it well,” says Summer. “You’re always poking your nose into everything of mine. I thought the one thing you wouldn’t try to do was housework. You’ve always been so slovenly, but I told you the washing machine was sealed shut, to be on the safe side.”

I’m barely paying attention. “So the dinghy was inside,” I say.

“Yep. We had to take out all the innards to fit it. And the dryer, too, to fit the outboard and the fuel tank. And then you tried to open it the moment you got to port. Adam told me what he had to do to distract you. What a laugh. He tried to be the worst lover he could, but you still couldn’t get enough of him.”

“That’s not true,” I say. She’s trying to humiliate me, and I do feel a pang. Adam knew. When he pushed himself inside me and called me a slut and a whore, it wasn’t a sexy game with his wife. He knew.

“Well, you must have super-low standards,” says Summer. “He never kissed you, not once. I made him promise.”

I open my mouth and close it again. Don’t say it, Iris. She’s holding a gun.

“You never had a period, did you?” I ask. “Not even at the pageant.”

“Aren’t we the clever one?” says Summer. “I had to cut myself to make that blood run down my leg. It was easy enough to fool Mum, but I always thought you might figure it out one day. You were always jabbering about how I got the perfect body while you were deformed, jabbering about us almost being Siamese twins. How we might have had to share organs. That’s what gave me the idea. It was your fault that things were wrong inside me.”

“I’m not deformed,” I say. “Everything’s backward, but it still works. Everything’s in place.”

Summer hisses in my ear. “I wasn’t missing anything, either,” she says. “I was perfect until you split off from me. I was whole. But then you stole from me. You stole my uterus. And frankly, I wouldn’t have cared, if it hadn’t turned out to be worth a hundred million dollars.”