The Broken Ones (19 page)

It has been her this entire time.

The woman is mirror perfect.

But I don’t see her. I see the girl I lost all those years ago. There she is, the girl who was born before me, but only by seconds. I see her as the five-year-old girl with freckles across her nose. I see the itchy jumper she used to wear in the winter and her wicked grin when we tricked our teachers. Her eyes are as sparkly as they ever were. Her face is mine, and yet it not. It is the face I have wanted—needed—to see all these years. She’s the other half of me that I’ve walked this world without. There she is. My sister.

Somehow it doesn’t matter that she has stalked and humiliated me, that she has reduced me to a quivering wreck: a woman standing over her own mother with a pillow, trying to decide whether I’d rather be a free murderer, or a trapped victim.

She stands before me. She’s here. She’s going to show me what to do, like she did all those years ago.

She lifts her chin. “Hello, Shadow.”

“I always hated that name.” I swallow. “
Sophie
.” It feels so right to say that name at last. Now I know why I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin, why I’ve felt like an imposter my entire life. The reason is standing there in front of me, eclipsing me, turning me into a shadow. She was taken before I could find my way out of that shadow. I fell in behind my mother, and I never managed to claw my way out.

“Hello,
Mother
.” Sophie’s tone of voice is ice-cold. Her eyes, identical to mine, narrow into two hard slits. Is that what I look like when I’m angry? Do I ever scrunch up my nose in that way? Are her facial tics my facial tics? We would have compared ourselves as we grew up. We would have stared into the mirror and giggled about how similar we were. Or how different.

Immediately, I can understand how Mum could always tell us apart. Sophie stands in a way that makes people look up to her. I slouch into my knees so that everyone looks down at me.

“Sophie. You’re… Is this real?” Mum’s voice is quiet, breathless. She can’t believe her own eyes. I’m not sure I can, either.

I move away from Mum so that she can sit up. There are traces of tears on her cheeks. She reaches forward as though to touch her long-lost daughter.

I watch as my sister’s expression morphs into a grimace. Her tensed shoulders almost fill the doorway. My eyes follow the long line of her arm to discover the knife in her hand. Of course. This woman stalked me. She broke into my house. She hacked my email account and cut my clothes into ribbons. It dawns on me that she probably slept with Peter.
That’s
why he turned up on the doorstep in such a disturbed state. She might even have killed our neighbour’s cat.

I can’t trust her.

Mum climbs unsteadily to her feet. “You’re here, and you’re real. I knew it. All these years, I knew it. And look at you. You’re as beautiful today as you were when I let you go. You’ve had a good life, haven’t you? They told me that the family was well off, that they’d provide for you better than I could.”

The real Sophie lets out a derisive snort. “I’ve been provided for. Don’t worry about that.” Her voice is sarcastic. Mocking. I want to bite my lip and cower. Doesn’t she know Mum’s temper? Doesn’t she know her sharp tongue?

Of course she doesn’t.

“You went to the family they told me about. Thank God. When I never heard from them again, all kinds of thoughts ran through my mind.” Mum hurries towards Sophie, but my sister cringes away from her. “What did they call you?”

Sophie recoils, shrinking back from the door. “Adeline.”

Mum places a hand over her mouth. “Adeline. So pretty.”

I can’t deny that it hurts me to see Mum treat this woman—who looks exactly like me—as anything other than the ugly, useless lump I’ve come to be. Why is Sophie… Adeline… so beautiful?

Mum reaches out, and Adeline allows her to run her fingers through her hair. Tears run down her chin.

“It was never supposed to be you,” Mum whispers.

Adeline’s eyes find mine. “That’s not a nice thing to say to your daughter.”

But Mum isn’t listening. She’s still touching Adeline’s hair.

I lower myself onto the bed and place my head in my hands. It’s only when the weight of the bed shifts that I lift my eyes to see Adeline sitting next to me.

“I wanted to be you,” she says. “I found out about you after my parents died. They left me some information in an envelope informing me about what happened. I read that note, and I needed to know more. I needed to see you. I hired an investigator and dug into your lives. That’s when I realised that you were living as Sophie. I thought you’d stolen my identity, the one that I should have had all those years ago.”

“So, you stalked me?”

She glances away and continues, ignoring my question. “It didn’t seem real. Part of me kept wondering whether it was all an elaborate hoax. But it made sense, because of who I am. The person I’ve grown up to be. Or not be.”

She’s the only one who understands. I’ve never been whole, but neither has she. I’ve never been Sophie, and she has never been Adeline.

“I never knew. The memories only started coming back to me recently, the first time I heard Mum say Shadow.” Saying it out loud sends a ripple down my spine. Is it excitement? Fear?

“After my parents… the people who raised me… died, I started having dreams. Then pieces came back to me.” She smiles. It seems genuine, and yet it’s missing an essential humanlike quality. Warmth. “So, tell me. Have you felt like half a person, too?”

“Yes.” The word is a breath.

“All because of her.”

We turn to Mum.

It’s Adeline doing the talking now, taking the lead as she did before she was snatched. “Tell us, Mum. What kind of mother sells one of her twin daughters before trying every other possible way to find money? I’ve heard extraordinary stories about women fighting for their children’s survival. Mothers sacrifice themselves to shield their children from natural disasters, they prostitute themselves to earn money for their children, they fight in war-torn countries to get their children to a safer place. And yet your first thought was to sell one of us.”

“It was never supposed to be you,” Mum says.

This time, we don’t react to that horrendous statement. We let her talk. We both want answers. This is our story. We have waited thirty years to hear it. We have been denied what was ours all along, and everything that has happened to us has come to this. We wait, and we listen.

“You were born first, Sophie. You were strong, healthy and beautiful. I gazed at your pink, round face, and for the first time in my life I felt what love is. Then I had to give birth to you, Becca.” She regards me. “And you weren’t easy. Not even from the beginning. You were born with the cord wrapped around your neck, and when the midwife tugged you out, you ruptured me. You wanted my blood right from the very beginning.

“You bruised my nipples from breastfeeding. You were always hungrier than Sophie, always needy and whining. The constant crying drove me mad. I started taking all the stress out on Geoff. Becca, you were all him. You had his temperament. Sophie searched for solutions to problems. She’s a go-getter, someone who will always come out on top because life will never beat her down. You long for life to beat you down, Becca. You’re the victim and you always will be, because that’s the character you chose to play in life. I saw that when you were still in nappies. I knew it.

“Geoff was weak and stupid, and he gave up on life.” She snarls when she says his name. “I married a man, but I buried a pathetic shell of a human being. He left me with nothing but debt. Gambling debt from a couple of loan sharks and a house I couldn’t afford. If either of you have ever known the weight of debt, you’ll know the kinds of decisions you have to make.

“I had no one to turn to. Don’t look at me like that. Your father burned every bridge I had. My parents wouldn’t even talk to me after I married that ‘good-for-nothing’ as Dad called him. I went to them once. They blanked me. Wouldn’t even say hello. I had nothing, except for you both.”

She folds her arms. “I made a bad decision.”

Adeline entwines her fingers with mine. I flash back to that day in the park. The man who snatched her away from me looms over me. The strawberry lollipop hits the grass with a thud. My face is red and hot from screaming and flailing, reaching out and grabbing her hair. There was no one around who cared enough to come running in answer to my screams.

Maybe that’s why I have always wanted a child. That’s why I have ached for one, why I have felt as though I’d lost the child I’d never had. I went through the trauma of losing a child. I failed to protect my big sister, and she failed to protect me, too.

I think about how I became so attached to little Chloe and her imaginary friend. She reminded me of myself when I was a little girl grieving for my dead sister while being forced to forget all about her. I wanted to protect Chloe because I failed to protect Sophie when the kidnappers came to take her away. 

“Becca, I can never forgive you,” Mum continues. “Because of you, I lost my Sophie.” She begins to cry. “But now I have her back. I can die, having seen her. When this disease takes me, I’ll know that I’ve seen you, Sophie, and that you’re safe.”

When Adeline replies to this, her words are measured and calm, devoid of any emotion. A cold, creeping shiver worms its way up my spine. “You tried to sell one child and you ended up losing your favourite, so you forced the child you had left to be someone else and bullied her for years to come. You’ve never taken any responsibility for your actions, and you still blame Becca for what you did. I’ve met some despicable people. My parents weren’t just rich, they were criminals. Why else would they need to buy a child? But you—you are the first person I’ve ever met who is truly broken inside. You’re barely even a person. You’re a monster.”

I watch as the blood drains from Mum’s face. She staggers back and slides slowly down the wall, ending up on her knees.

“We should call the police,” I say.

“No,” Adeline replies. “Not yet.” She turns to me, and I can’t help but gasp at the incredible likeness once again. “Becca, she was right about one thing. You do like to be a victim. You’ve stayed with this woman all your life, putting your own life on hold for someone who has so little love for you that she tried to sell you as a child. Where is your self-worth?”

“She beat it out of me a long time ago,” I whisper.

“You’re a grown woman,” Adeline replies. “I’m sorry for what’s happened to you, but I can never understand it.”

The room is silent. Three women sit, and none of them look at each other.

It’s me who breaks the silence. “You stalked me. You made me think that I was going insane. All this time, I thought it was Mum. I thought she was playing one last cruel joke on me before the Alzheimer’s claims her.”

Adeline starts to laugh. “You thought it was her? That’s too perfect!”

“It’s not funny!” I wrench my hand from hers.

The laughter stops. “Yes, it is.”

“I’m going to call the police.” I stand up, ready to retrieve my phone and end this charade.

But Adeline is quick to grasp my wrist. “No. That’s not what’s going to happen.”

I frown at her. “What are you talking about? Mum needs to answer for what she did all those years ago. They could arrest the man who took you.”

But Adeline shakes her head. “No.”

She pulls me back onto the bed. I search her face for answers, but all I find is a blank mask.

“We have to,” I whisper.

“No.”

“Then, what?”

“I had something else in mind. But it doesn’t involve the police.” Adeline’s voice is still as devoid of emotion as her expression. I wonder… How much of Mum is in Adeline?

“What happened to you after you were sold?” I ask. “Where did you go?”

“I went to New York,” she says. “And I became a millionaire. It was the American dream in action. Becca. Sophie. My sister. I’m giving you a choice, and I want you to listen very closely. There’s one reason I came to England, and it wasn’t to catch up.

“I grew up around people who settled their differences in a very different manner. I’ve attended more funerals than weddings, and the last funeral was for my parents. The ones who bought me like a prize racehorse. You see, Daddy liked to break little girls, and Mommy liked to let it happen. It took me a while to figure out what I needed to do, but after I did it, I inherited millions of dollars. I’m quite willing to share those millions with you, little sis, but there’s one thing you need to do for me first.”

When she’s grins at me, it’s psychotic.

“What do you want me to do?” I force the words through a strangle-like grip on my throat. My mouth is bone-dry and my tongue is thick. The atmosphere in the room is as heavy as a brewing thunderstorm. I can taste the mildewed scent of the old photographs hanging around us, dripping with festering memories.

“I’m giving you a choice, which is more than Mum ever did for us. The choice is about life or death. Live, and come with me to New York, or die never leaving this grey, washed-out country.”