The Girl in the Mirror(81)

Even without a uterus, Summer is perfect. She is brilliant, glittering, metallic. She is a siren. Now I see what makes her beautiful, what has always made her beautiful. She has never needed anyone else. Her missing womb somehow makes her more self-contained. What is a womb but a yearning for motherhood, a yearning for a baby? But Summer doesn’t yearn. Summer doesn’t need. Summer takes.

And she knows me so much better than I realized. She knows everything I tried to keep secret from her. She thinks she can read my mind. Can she?

She believes that I don’t care about the baby. She believes that I am willing to sail away. Or else she’s pretending to believe. As long as I think she’s going to let me live, I’ll cooperate. Yes, there’s a gun pressing into my neck, but if I knew she was going to kill me, I might as well take my chances. Crash the car. Make a run for it. Try to knock the gun out of her hand.

Instead I’m playing along. Buying time. Trying to catch up, trying to think of something Summer hasn’t thought of.

The only thing I’m sure that Summer doesn’t know is that Ben found me out. I try to think of a way to use this to my advantage. Ben knows. Ben can tell us apart. You’ll never fool Ben.

I bite my lip. Don’t speak. It won’t make any difference. It will only endanger Ben. If she is planning to kill me, she would probably kill Ben, too, before he could expose her crime. I’m thankful that Ben is heading back to New York. I hope, I pray, that he keeps his word and never comes back. If I am going to die tonight, I need to know that the people I care about will be safe. My mother. Ben. Esther.

She’s my twin sister. She predicted everything I would do since she disappeared in March. She guessed I would step into her life, get pregnant, beat Virginia to the cash.

I’ve said that I won’t come back, but does anyone believe words spoken at gunpoint?



Carmichael Bridge looms ahead. It’s closed to traffic nowadays; the main road north is further inland. People only come here to see the crocodiles. No one will come at night.

Random scenes from the last seven months jump into my mind. I have no way of knowing how much of the life I perceived as Summer’s was real. Did she really spend her days running around after Tarquin, cleaning Helen’s piano, and cooking Adam’s favorite meals, or were those tasks set specially for me? Those phone reminders, that freaky shared wedding album, were they fakes planted for me? Did Adam make all the decisions and get all the money banked into his account to stop me from having any influence over Summer’s life while I was keeping it warm for her? Were Summer’s stories about Adam’s romantic seductions any truer than the shameful sexyrape he tried out on me? I want to ask, but I know I can’t. I don’t get to find out.

Some things I do know. Summer doesn’t like sailing. Her raptures over Bathsheba, over Adam, were lies to lure me in. All the glamorous touches, the lingerie, the jewelry. The grand piano, which they kept even though no one could play it. The stories of spectacular sex. And I fell for it. I fell for it all. She’s been as single-minded as a predator, and I have been her prey.

“Pull over,” says Summer. “We’ll wait for Bathsheba here.”

The parking lot is empty. I pull into the nearest spot. I can’t quite see the bridge from here, but there’s a clear view downstream. The river, gleaming black under an almost cloudless night sky, is sluggish and wide, lazing its way toward the sea. The shore is thick with mangroves. I know what lurks there.

Further downstream, the river twists around a bend, so I can’t see the ocean from here, but the river is navigable right up to the bridge. Dad brought Bathsheba in here sometimes.

The moon is high. Somewhere out on the open sea, Adam is sailing toward us. Is he bringing me life and freedom, or death?

Perhaps Summer is waiting for him to do the dirty work for her. Or am I really going to be allowed to leave?

Cairns is nearly two hundred nautical miles away. Bathsheba’s a fast boat, but not that fast. There’s no way she’s going to get here before sunrise.

Summer must know this.

And there’s no way Summer’s planning to wait here all night.

There’s something else. Something not right about the way Summer’s been talking. She’s told me too much. She didn’t need to tell me that she faked her death. She could have invented a miraculous rescue. She didn’t need to tell me that she doesn’t have a uterus. She could have pretended that she’d lost the baby.

There’s only one reason she would tell me everything. She doesn’t care what I know. It doesn’t matter what I know. That’s how sure she is that I’m never going to see another sunrise.

My sister is going to kill me.

I feel calm. I’ve been so stupid, it’s like I deserve it. Not just for these past months. For my whole life. Summer has fooled me since we were fourteen years old. Since our father died. She never had a uterus. She managed to keep it a secret not only from me, but from Annabeth. I remember her asking our mother to buy more tampons, complaining about cramps. Nothing seemed amiss. She was meticulous. The last thing on anybody’s mind when Summer very publicly got her first period at the beauty pageant was that she might be faking it. What better way to hide a lie than to make it look like a humiliating accident?

She never would have had a chance of getting the money if I hadn’t been so jealous of her life. In an alternate universe, Iris Carmichael stepped onto shore in the Seychelles and told the truth. Who knows what future awaited her? The first man she laid eyes on was Daniel Romain. He was a man perhaps better suited for me than Adam ever was, a man who seemed to know me at first sight. A man with golden eyes, with whom I could have sailed away into an equally golden sunset.