Chapter 1 - The Voice from the Dead
The fluorescent lights of the kitchen island in my Minneapolis home hummed with an agonizing, predictable consistency. It was a Monday morning like any other—until the vibration of my phone shattered the quiet routine I had spent a decade building. For ten years, my life had been measured in the quiet aftermath of a catastrophe. Ten years since Gemma, my identical twin and the missing half of my soul, had driven off an isolated highway outside Rochester, plunging down a steep embankment in a vehicle that exploded into a suffocating inferno.
The authorities had found almost nothing left of her. We held a closed-casket funeral, mourning over an empty, heavy box while my world crumbled to ash. I had moved to St. Paul, forced myself through intense grief counseling, and settled into a safe, quiet accounting job that demanded nothing more than cold, unfeeling numbers. I had learned how to carry the grief, but I had never learned how to replace her.
Then the phone call came.
A cheerful voice from a local dental clinic in Bloomington told me my sister Gemma was sitting in their waiting room. Her phone battery had died, and they found me listed as her emergency contact.
A cold panic seized my throat. It was impossible. Gemma was dead. I had stood at her gravesite.
Yet, when the receptionist passed the receiver over, a voice I hadn’t heard in a decade whispered through the static: “Hannah? Please come get me.”
It was her. The cadence, the pitch, the secret inflection of her words—it was my twin. My hands shook so violently I nearly dropped the phone. Without asking for an explanation, I grabbed my keys, stumbled out the door, and drove like a woman possessed through a blur of traffic lights and racing thoughts.
When I finally pushed open the glass doors of the Bloomington dental clinic, my heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. The receptionist pointed toward the waiting area. Sitting alone in a corner chair, pressing an ice pack against her swollen cheek, was a woman. She looked older, her face lined with a decade of invisible hardship, but when she looked up, I locked eyes with my own reflection—our mother’s eyes, Gemma’s eyes.
May you like
She stood up slowly, looking at me with a mixture of terror and overwhelming relief, and whispered the childhood nickname only the two of us knew.
As I stared at her, the blood roaring in my ears, a horrifying, reality-shattering realization gripped my soul: If Gemma had been alive all these years... who the hell did we bury ten years ago?
