Three days later, Mara came home alone.
Daniel was still in the hospital but out of danger. Meredith had been arrested on the assault and was being investigated in connection with the Willow Street fire. Tori was cooperating in the case involving the men who attacked me.
I did not know what sentence anyone would eventually receive.
Strangely, I no longer needed to know right away.
For days after my death, I had believed that if everyone paid the correct price, something inside me would become lighter.
Lightness did not feel like victory.
It felt like exhaustion.
Mara had given the police her real name.
“Mara Mercer.”
Those two words made the tether between us tremble.
After that, the memories leaking between us became rarer. Mirrors stopped holding expressions half a second too long. Something had begun withdrawing from the boundary we had blurred.
The house remained mostly as we had left it. At night the walls were so quiet I could hear old wood settling in tiny creaks.
Mara went to my room and opened the closet.
She removed my hair tie.
My cardigan.
My watch.
Finally, my student ID.
CLAIRE MERCER.
She held it for a long time.
Without my hair and my clothes arranged around her, her face returned to its familiar coldness. I used to believe that expression meant there was nothing behind it.
One of many things I had been wrong about.
Mara looked at the card.
“I’m not you.”
The room changed.
Barely.
The mirror above my dresser fogged as if invisible breath moved across it.
Mara looked up.
Only she stood there.
I was not behind her.
No smile remained after hers faded.
“I don’t want to be you anymore.”
The tether vibrated once.
Then the pull changed direction.
Not toward Mara.
Downstairs.
Out the back door.
Toward the magnolia tree.
Mara carried my clothes and ID outside.
The place where she had buried me had been dug open after she finally told police where to find my body. Beneath the tree, the soil was darker where it had been filled again.
My body was gone.
The place still felt more like home than anywhere else.
Mara sat down and folded my clothes beside the trunk. She laid my ID on top.
The magnolia’s late blossoms were sparse this time of year, but their sweet, lemony scent still caught in the damp night air. Leaves rubbed together overhead with a dry whisper.
For a long time, Mara only studied her hands.
The knuckles were still scraped.
“You said I could get better.”
I sat across from her.
“I tried.”
Her voice remained level. That made the sentence sound almost awkward.
“When we were ten, after the knife, I knew Mom and Dad wanted to send me away.”
Mara picked up a fallen leaf and snapped the stem between her fingers.
“I didn’t understand why everyone was scared.”
She paused.
“I only wanted to know what would happen if you died.”
I remembered that night.
Remembered lying awake until morning because I was afraid to turn my back on the bedroom door.
“Then you told me to be good.”
Mara lowered her head.
“I thought if I got better, you wouldn’t leave.”
I wanted to answer immediately.
That isn’t what I meant.
But living words sometimes arrive inside another person carrying a meaning the speaker never intended. It had taken my death to understand something that simple.
“I didn’t get there in time,” Mara said.
A small laugh came out crooked.
“You left first.”
She covered her eyes.
“I found them.”
Her shoulders began to shake.
“I didn’t kill Warren.”
I looked at her.
“I tried not to kill the men in the warehouse.”
Her breathing broke apart.
“I didn’t want what happened at the Hales’ house either.”
Tears slid through her fingers.
Mara wiped them away immediately, as though crying were another mess she could clean.
“But I still did bad things.”
For the first time since I died, Mara cried with no one present to perform for.
She was terrible at it.
Could not breathe evenly. Could not stop. Kept wiping until the skin around her eyes turned red.
“Claire…”
I lifted my head.
“I got better.”
Her voice broke completely.
“I really did.”
She pressed one hand to the dark soil.
“So can you come back now?”
The wind stopped.
Even the leaves went quiet.
I looked at my sister and finally understood how the promise from age ten had lived inside her.
A contract.
Be good and Claire stays.
Be bad and Claire leaves.
She had spent years trying to fix herself like a child finishing homework because an adult had promised a reward.
“Idiot.”
The sound came out of me.
Actually out.
Mara’s head snapped up.
I froze too.
“Claire?”
“Mara.”
Her eyes stopped exactly where I stood.
They did not pass through.
Did not land on the tree behind me.
She saw me.
For one impossible moment, beneath the magnolia our parents planted for two babies born seven minutes apart, we stood in front of each other as separate people.
Mara Mercer.
Claire Mercer.
No one wearing the other’s name.
Mara reached toward me.
Her fingers passed through my shoulder.
She pulled back.
I smiled. “Still can’t touch me.”
She stared at her hand.
Then asked, “Are you mad at me?”
I wanted to say no.
It would have been prettier.
Easier.
We had hidden enough from each other.
“Yes.”
Her face locked.
“I’m mad that you always think hurting someone is the fastest answer.”
She said nothing.
“I’m mad that you get hurt and still won’t ask anyone for help.”
Her hand closed.
“And I’m mad that you decide everything for me and call it protecting me.”
Mara lowered her eyes.
“But I never stopped loving you.”
She looked up.
“When I told you to get better, I wasn’t giving you a price for me staying.”
“Then what were you doing?”
I looked at the face that had resembled mine so perfectly for days and was now entirely hers.
“I wanted you to have another choice.”
Mara stayed quiet.
“You were never supposed to earn it.”
“Earn what?”
“Me loving you.”
Tears moved down her face again.
This time she did not wipe them.
“Then why did you hide everything from me?”
I knew what she meant.
Tori.
Warren.
The bruises.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Yes.”
The answer hurt her. I could see it.
“I was afraid you’d do exactly what you just did.”
Mara looked down.
“So you didn’t trust me.”
“No.”
I let the word remain between us.
“And I was wrong too. I thought hiding everything was protecting you. All it did was make you learn the truth when I was already gone and couldn’t answer for any of it.”
Wind stirred through the magnolia again.
A few pale petals loosened and spiraled into the dark grass.
My hands were fading.
Mara noticed immediately.
“No.”
She stepped toward me.
“Claire.”
“Mara.”
“You promised.”
I smiled, and this time it hurt.
“I know.”
“You’re doing it again.”
“No.”
“You’re leaving.”
I lifted my hand and held it where her hair should have been beneath my palm.
“You don’t have to become me to keep me.”
Her mouth tightened.
I remembered five-year-old Mara tipping glass into my milk because she wanted to know what pain looked like from the outside.
Back then, I believed that if I loved her long enough, I could turn her into somebody else.
I had been wrong about that too.
Love does not repair a person like an object.
Sometimes all it can do is make one choice worth struggling toward instead of another.
“Mara Mercer.”
I said her full name.
“Yeah?”
“When this is over, don’t live for me.”
She swallowed.
“Then what am I supposed to live for?”
I laughed.
“You’ll have to figure that out yourself.”
A sound escaped her through the tears that was almost a laugh.
Awkward. Crooked. Nothing like mine.
I liked it better than every smile she had practiced in my mirror.
My body thinned into the night.
“Claire.”
“Yeah?”
“I miss you.”
“I know.”
Then I was gone.
Mara stayed beneath the magnolia until the sky began to gray.
When she finally stood, she carried my clothes back inside but left my student ID beside the roots.
In the bathroom, she washed her face, took out the hair tie, and passed the mirror.
One girl stood in it.
Not Claire Mercer.
No reflection lagged behind.
Only Mara.
She stopped and looked at herself for a while.
Then she tried to smile.
It was still awkward.
Still a little crooked.
This time, she did not correct it.
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