Chapter 1 - The Voice That Shouldn't Exist
My twin sister d*ed in a car crash ten years ago — last Monday, a local dental office called asking me to come pick her up because her phone had died.
Nora and I were the kind of twins who finished each other's sentences without meaning to. We traded sweaters, borrowed each other's friends, and shared that wordless radio signal people always swear twins have. Then, ten years ago almost to the day, her car left a dark stretch of rural highway outside Halloway and went down a steep bank.
The car burned. By the time the fire crews knocked the flames down, the officers who came to my parents' door told us there was hardly anything left to bring home. We buried a closed casket. Losing her felt like someone had reached into my chest and taken out the half that knew how to be calm.
It took me years of therapy to feel like a working person again. Eventually I packed up and moved to Millbrook, took a low-stress job doing the books for a landscaping company, and slowly built something that resembled a life. I still missed her every day. But the grief had worn down from a blade to a bruise.
Last Monday started like nothing at all. I was at my kitchen counter, one leg tucked under me, typing a work email, when my phone rang. The screen showed a local number I didn't know. I figured it was a reminder for a checkup and picked up.
"Hi — is this Erin?" A bright, friendly woman's voice. "I'm calling from Cedar Ridge Dental over on Blanton Street."
"Speaking," I said.
"Wonderful. I've got your sister, Nora, up here at our front desk," she said, easy as anything. "She's all done with her procedure, still a little woozy from the sedation. Her phone's dead, but she had your number memorized as her emergency contact. She was hoping you could come get her."
I didn't move. The whole kitchen seemed to go quiet around me.
"I'm sorry," I said, my fingers closing hard around the phone. "Who did you say was there?"
"Nora," she repeated, a little less sure of herself now. "She's sitting right here in our waiting room."
I almost laughed. It had to be a prank — a sick one.
"Do you want to talk to her?" the receptionist asked.
My mouth had gone dry as paper. "Yes."
A shuffle, a bump against the receiver, and then a voice I knew better than my own:
"Erin? Please come get me."
Every hair on my arms stood straight up.
It was Nora's voice.
I wrote down the address and drove there on autopilot. I don't remember a single traffic light.
When I finally pushed open the door to that waiting room, I stopped cold.
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Who was sitting in that waiting room — and where had she been for ten years? Comment "NEXT" if you want Part 2. 👇
