“Chloe, didn’t know you and Ethan were into this kind of thing. That new themed hotel downtown? Wild.” The photograph beneath my best friend’s message made the blood drain from my face. Ethan was walking out of the hotel lobby with a woman wrapped around his arm, her head resting against his shoulder, his hand settled at the small of her back with the easy familiarity of a man who knew exactly who he was touching.

Chapter 1

The woman had my face.

But she wasn’t me.

She was my identical twin sister, Clara.

I was still at the office after midnight, alone in a conference room revising a proposal that should have been finished hours earlier. Clara was wearing my emerald-green dress, the one Ethan had bought for my twenty-fifth birthday. Around her neck hung the silver pendant he had custom-made for me, engraved on the back with our initials.

I enlarged the photograph until the pixels blurred.

There was no mistake.

My first instinct was to drive home, drag Ethan out of bed, and demand an explanation. Instead, I sat motionless beneath the fluorescent lights because another thought was already poisoning everything.

Clara and I looked almost perfectly alike.

Almost.

Above my left collarbone was a tiny brown crescent-shaped birthmark. Ethan had noticed it on our third date. He had kissed it and joked that God must have signed His work so nobody could ever confuse me with my sister.

If Ethan had been close enough to Clara to leave a hotel with his hand beneath her coat, he had been close enough to notice that mark was missing.

By the time I reached our apartment, Ethan was asleep.

I stood beside the bed staring at him.

Three years together. Three years of shared rent, Sunday grocery runs, bad movies, morning coffee, arguments about thermostat settings, and half-serious conversations about rings.

He looked peaceful.

I hated him for that.

Unable to sleep, I took my laptop into the study and began searching. Clara was careful online, but not careful enough. After nearly an hour, I found a burner account linked to an old email address she had once used in college.

The first post stopped my breathing.

I never thought I’d see my first love again. Then I found out he’s dating my twin sister.

My hands went cold.

I kept reading.

Clara and I had attended different high schools after our grandmother died and gone to colleges in different states. She had never once mentioned that Ethan had been her boyfriend before I met him.

The next entry was worse.

I put on my sister’s dress and pretended to be her. He knew immediately. He told me so afterward. He said he loves her now, but if that’s true, why didn’t he push me away?

My throat tightened.

Another post.

Three months. We keep meeting. Sometimes I dress like her. Sometimes I don’t. He always knows. I’m falling in love with him again.

Then the most recent one.

My sister worked late tonight. Ethan took me to a hockey game. It used to be our thing in high school. Afterward, he told me I hadn’t changed. Tonight we stayed together until almost dawn.

I stopped reading.

For months, Ethan had claimed he was working late.

Clara had suddenly begun calling me more often, bringing small gifts, asking about my schedule.

Two days earlier, she had asked whether I would be working late this week.

I had laughed.

“Why? Planning to rob my apartment?”

She had rolled her eyes.

“I have a career, Chloe. I don’t organize my life around men.”

I looked toward the bedroom.

For three years Ethan had rubbed my back when migraines made me sick. He remembered how I took my coffee. When my cramps were bad, he warmed milk and sat beside me until I slept.

And yet he had knowingly slept with my sister.

I returned to the bedroom and grabbed his shirt.

Ethan jerked awake.

“Chloe?”

I pulled him upright hard enough that fear flashed across his face.

“What happened?”

For one second, I wanted to throw the laptop at him.

Instead, I let go.

“You were having a nightmare.”

He stared at me.

“What?”

“You were talking in your sleep.”

His confusion looked genuine enough to make me hate him more.

I changed clothes.

“Where are you going?”

“Work.”

“It’s four in the morning.”

“I have an early meeting.”

I left before he could touch me.

At eight, my phone buzzed.

Clara.

Dinner tonight? I made beef stew. You’ve been working too much.

That message broke something the hotel picture hadn’t.

Because before Clara was the woman sleeping with my boyfriend, she had been the girl who raised me.

We had been abandoned as infants and taken in by an elderly woman named Mary Summers, whom we called Grandma. We were poor enough that hunger became part of the furniture.

When Grandma died, Clara was only sixteen, but she somehow became the adult.

She took the burnt piece of toast and gave me the clean one.

She wore the coat with the broken zipper and insisted mine looked stupid on her anyway.

When there was one egg, she gave me the yolk.

Once, when we were children, she gathered wild greens because we had nothing else to eat. She tasted every leaf first.

“If it makes me sick,” she said, “you don’t eat it.”

That was Clara.

Big sisters protect little sisters.

She had whispered those words beside Grandma’s photograph for years.

Now she was asking whether I would be home so she could decide when it was safe to see Ethan.

I typed slowly.

I’m coming.

Then I added:

I miss your cooking.

Her answer came immediately.

I’ll simmer the meat longer. Your teeth have always been sensitive.

I locked myself inside an office bathroom and cried until my ribs hurt.

When I finally stood, I opened Clara’s burner account one last time.

Someone had left a comment beneath her post.

Does it hurt being your sister’s shadow? Watching him choose her when he met you first?

Clara had answered.

More than anything. I regret what I’m doing, but sometimes I think she got the life I sacrificed mine to give her.

I stared at that sentence.

Then I opened my email.

Five months earlier, Professor David Mercer had offered to sponsor me for a doctoral research program at the University of Edinburgh. I had declined because leaving the country would mean leaving Clara alone.

Now I wrote:

Professor Mercer, if the position is still available, I’d like to accept.

He called within minutes.

“Chloe, are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“You said family obligations made relocation impossible.”

“They don’t anymore.”

There was a pause.

Then he said, “I can begin the paperwork today.”

“Please do.”

After hanging up, I sent Ethan one message.

We’re done. Don’t look for me.

Then I went to my sister’s apartment for dinner.