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Ten years after my twin sister supposedly di3d, I received a phone call from a dental office asking me to come pick her up.
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At first, I assumed they had the wrong number. Then they put Clara on the phone.
“Sarah? Please come get me.”
The second she said my name, my entire body went cold. I knew that voice. I had spent ten years trying to forget how much I missed hearing it. I was thirty years old, sitting at my kitchen island with my laptop open and a half-finished cup of coffee beside me. Seconds earlier, it had been an ordinary morning. Now I was gripping the edge of the counter so tightly my fingers hurt. When the receptionist came back on the line, I forced myself to speak.
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“I’m sorry. Who exactly is there with you?”
“Your sister, Clara,” the woman replied. “She had dental work this morning and is still a little disoriented from the medication. Her phone died, so she gave us your number.”
I could barely breathe.
“My sister died ten years ago.”
Silence. Then the receptionist spoke carefully.
“I’m very sorry. Would you like me to put her back on?”
“Yes.”
There was a rustling sound. Then that voice again.
“Sarah?”
My chest tightened painfully.
“Where are you?”
She gave me the address.
“Don’t leave.”
“I won’t.”
I grabbed my keys and ran out of the house. Clara and I had been twenty when she “died.” Her car had left a dark highway, rolled down an embankment, and caught fire before emergency crews reached it. Authorities told us there was almost nothing left to recover. We buried a closed coffin. My mother visited Clara’s grave every week for years. My father refused to drive that stretch of highway. And I spent most of my twenties learning how to exist without the person who had been beside me since before either of us could remember.
Therapy helped. Eventually, I moved about twenty minutes from my parents, found a steady job, and bought a small house. I learned how to make plans that didn’t include Clara. But grief leaves strange habits behind. Sometimes I still bought two pastries without realizing it. I still owned two matching blue mugs. One for me. One that I always called “the spare.”
When I reached the dental office, I pushed through the waiting-room door. A woman sitting in the corner slowly stood. I stopped breathing. She looked older. Of course she did. So did I. Her hair was shorter than I remembered, and a pale scar curved along one side of her jaw. But her eyes were the same. And she was twisting a silver ring around her finger in exactly the way Clara used to twist her bracelets whenever she was nervous.
“Hi,” she whispered.
I stared at her.
“Don’t just say hi.”
Her nervous smile vanished.
“Okay.”
I couldn’t make myself hug her. Not yet.
“What did we call the dent in my bedroom wall?”
Her eyes immediately filled with tears.
“The moon.”
My stomach twisted.
“Who broke Mom’s vase during the blizzard?”
“I did. You took the blame because Dad said he’d ground me and I wanted to go to Maisie’s birthday.”
My knees almost gave out. Clara moved toward me. I stepped backward.
“It’s really you.”
“You don’t have to understand everything right now,” she said.
“You don’t get to tell me what I have to understand.”
She stopped.
“You’re right.”
Same eyes. Same tiny line between her eyebrows when she was frightened. It was Clara. And somehow that realization made me feel worse, not better.
“How are you alive?”
She glanced around the office.
“Can we leave first?”
“No.”
“Sarah—”
“How are you alive?”
Her voice dropped.
“I survived the crash.”
I stared at her.
“We buried you.”
“The coffin was empty.”
“Mom still puts flowers on your grave.”
Clara closed her eyes.
