“You’re just as worthless as your mother, and if you open your mouth, I swear no one will believe you!”
When my identical twin sister appeared at my door in Phoenix with that phrase still trembling on her lips, I felt the air snag in my lungs. Our names were Gabrielle and Geneve, and ever since we were little girls, the world had failed to tell us apart.
We shared the same honey-brown hair, the same flint-gray eyes, and the same tiny jagged scar above our left eyebrows from a tumble off the swings in second grade. But that night, despite having my own face, the woman standing before me looked like a shattered version of what I might have become if life had slowly ground me into the dirt.
Her lip was split open and her right cheek was puffy and bruised. There were dark purple finger marks staining the skin of her arms, looking like shadows against her pale complexion.
Worse than the physical injuries was the way she kept glancing down the hallway behind her, acting as if a monster were chasing her through the corridor. “Please don’t tell Dad,” she whispered the second she stepped inside, her voice barely audible over the hum of the air conditioner.
I locked the door and guided her to the armchair, trying to keep my own hands from shaking as I poured her a glass of water. She was trembling so violently that the water sloshed over the rim, soaking her sleeves while she stared into space.
“What happened to you, Gen?” I asked softly, kneeling in front of her.
At first, she didn’t want to talk, opting instead to cry silently while hugging her knees as if she wanted to disappear into the upholstery. That silence terrified me more than the bruises because my sister had always been sensitive, but she had never been a coward.
After our parents’ messy divorce, I had stayed with my mom, eventually moving out to work at a local bakery while I finished my degree. Geneve had stayed with our father in a sprawling estate in Scottsdale, where he lived with his new wife, Francine.
Our father usually left the house before sunrise to manage a logistics firm and rarely returned before the sun went down. Francine stayed home, played the part of the devoted parishioner, smiled at the neighbors over the fence, and knew exactly how to fake a gentle soul.
