The Girl in the Mirror(85)

We hold the service in the saloon. Nine people in here is a crowd; I’m not going to get a moment alone with Adam till after the service. I’m impatient to find out his true feelings.

Everybody today is telling lies about Iris; it’s hard to keep track. A minister who never met her makes an interminable and inaccurate speech about a promising young lawyer whose career was cut short. Mum, in the same black dress that she wore to my father’s funeral, talks about her special bond with her middle child. Colton and Virginia espouse regret that they didn’t get to know Iris better. Letitia Buckingham says how much fun it was to be best friends with identical twins. Noah and Adam and Ben say as little as possible.

My mother weeps, and I do my best to cry with her.

Nine people to mourn a life. It’s not much of a legacy. My spine tingles at the thought that Iris is really dead now. No possibility of resurrection. I’ve promised Ben that I will keep what happened secret forever.

It’s for the best. Ben will go back to New York, I will live as Summer, and no one will ever suspect what Ben did.

Colton approaches me after the service. “Summer, the money is all in your hands now,” he says. “I have one question, and it’s just idle curiosity. Why did you mortgage yourselves so heavily to buy Bathsheba? If you hadn’t had the baby, you guys would have been in trouble.”

“But we always were going to have the baby,” I say. Colton doesn’t have any power over me anymore. Without the trust fund in his hands, he’s just a nosy uncle, the family bore. “We always were going to get the money. Surely you knew that. I am the oldest.”

Colton’s eyes widen, but now Mum is calling me from outside.

“Summer, it’s time to go! Adam’s on the deck waiting for you.”

I say goodbye to Colton. I say goodbye to Letitia and Virginia. I say goodbye to Noah.

On my way through the pilothouse, I hug Ben. “Have a safe flight back to New York,” I say.

There’s a bouquet of white irises on the pilothouse table. I bury my nose in them and breathe deep. I arrange my face into an expression of bliss. I have to remember to keep sniffing these weeds whenever my brainless brother is around.

Now it’s time to get off this floating hellhole and go meet Rosebud.

I step into the blinding sunshine and take my husband’s hand.

It feels good to be one person again at last. My clone has been ripped to pieces. Crocodiles are digesting her deformed body: her twisted heart, her leaky breasts, her womb.





Acknowledgments




The community of round-the-world sailors is full of generous, resourceful, and smart people, and my family and I couldn’t have made it across the Indian Ocean without the friendship of the families of the vessels Gromit, Sophia, Utopia II, Simanderal, WaterMusick, and Totem. I cherish a hope that one day someone will read this novel and feel inspired to sail away. If so, sailingtotem.com is a great place to start your journey.

Thank you to my friends, readers, and fact-checkers, including Jessica Stephens, Cliff Hopkins, Vivien Reid, Greg Lee, Marie-Paule Craeghs, Sarah Heaslip, Nicci Duffy, Behan Gifford, and Charlotte Gibbs. Any errors are my sole responsibility.

I am so grateful to my wonderful publishers and editors, including Jane Palfreyman, Ali Lavau, Elizabeth Cowell, Christa Munns and Angela Handley at Allen & Unwin, and Liz Stein and Laura Cherkas at William Morrow. And to my rights manager at Allen & Unwin, Maggie Thompson, and my American agent, Faye Bender. Thank you, all of you, for believing in my manuscript.

Thanks are due to the New Zealand Society of Authors and Creative New Zealand for awarding me the mentorship with Dan Myers, whose enthusiasm convinced me to keep writing, and to the Michael King Writers Centre for awarding me a residency. Thank you also to my fellow writers at the University of Auckland, including Amy McDaid, Rosetta Allan, Heidi North, and Paula Morris. Thank you to the late Elwyn Richardson, who took me on as his student when I was nine years old and promised me I would be a published author one day.

Thank you to my amazing children: Ben, who climbed the mast for me and who hand-steered our yacht through long night watches; Moses, who took solo watches before he had reached his teens and who knew every species of fish; Florence, who fixed so much equipment and who swam with sharks. Thank you, also, to my inspiring aunt Kathryn and my lovely mother, Christina.

Finally, my brother and sister. David, when I lost you, I felt like a twin without a twin. And Maddie, you taught me to live again. What a delicious irony it was to write a book about jealous sisters when surely no siblings have ever been as free from rivalry as you and David and I always were. This novel is yours as much as it is mine.