Page 76 of Twins for the Off-Limits Lawyer

"Well, I'll be switched," Sue Ellen said as I slid into my usual booth by the window, the one with the rip in the seat that caught your jeans if you weren't careful. "Look what the cat dragged in. Heard tell you went off to England to hobnob with fancy folks. How'd that work out for you, sugar?"

"About as well as you'd expect from someone who thought she could play in the big leagues," I said, and she nodded like that explained the mysteries of the universe.

"Meatloaf today's fresher than yesterday's, if that tells you anything worth knowing. You want the usual?"

The usual. Meatloaf that would make Gordon Ramsay weep, mashed potatoes from a box, and green beans that came from a can that tasted like childhood and not giving a damn about anything fancier. Food that would probably send Lady Victoria into cardiac arrest but felt like a hug from the inside out.

"Yes, ma'am. And sweet tea, if you don't mind."

"What kind of establishment you think I'm running here? Course I got sweet tea. Made it fresh this morning, sweet enough to float a horseshoe."

I smiled for what felt like the first time in weeks. This was the anti-London—no Michelin stars or sommeliers or waiters who looked down their noses if you used the wrong fork. Here, food was comfort, not performance art. Sue Ellen didn't care about my romantic scandals or my visa status or whether I knew the difference between a fish fork and a salad fork. She only cared whether I wanted extra gravy and if I had room for pie.

The meatloaf arrived with a side of local gossip about Mrs. Henderson’s new hip replacement and speculation about whether the Henderson boys would finally sell their daddy's farm to that developer from Austin. Normal problems from normal people living normal lives where the biggest scandal was who'd been seen at the Walmart in the next county over, buying their groceries instead of shopping local.

"You seem different," Sue Ellen observed, refilling my tea glass without being asked.

"Older, maybe. Or just tired down to your bones. Both, probably."

"Hmm." She studied me with the practiced eye of someone who'd been reading customers' troubles for longer than I'd been alive. "Whatever happened over there in fancy land, it wasn't all bad, was it?"

I thought about Edward's hands on my face, about the way he'd looked at me like I was something precious and impossible and worth protecting.

About Daphne's laugh during our late-night conversations, about feeling like I belonged somewhere for the first time in my life, even if it had all been built on lies and manipulation and my own willful blindness.

"No," I admitted around the lump in my throat. "It wasn't all bad."

"Well then," Sue Ellen said, patting my shoulder with a flour-dusted hand that smelled like honest work and uncomplicated kindness, "maybe it wasn't all good either. Life's got a way of being complicated like that, mixing up the sweet with the bitter until you can't tell which is which."

I ate my meatloaf and watched the familiar rhythm of small-town life through the diner's streaked window, trying not to think about how exhausting it had been to constantly be "on" in Edward's world. But also trying not to think about how much I missed the intensity of it all, the feeling that every moment mattered because it might be the last one where he looked at me like I was his salvation instead of his downfall.

Back in my room that evening, I faced the devastating reality I'd been tap-dancing around for three weeks. I had lost Daphne. Not just because I'd fallen in love with her brother, but because we'd both been lying to each other from the moment I'd set foot in that manor.

I pulled out my college photo albums, the physical ones from back when we still printed pictures and put them in books like civilized people, and spread them across my bed like evidenceof a friendship I'd thought was real. Spring break in Cancún, both of us sunburned and grinning with questionable tequila decisions written all over our faces. Late-night study sessions in the library, surrounded by empty coffee cups and her organic chemistry textbooks that might as well have been written in ancient Greek for all I understood them. Graduation day, our arms around each other, caps askew, both of us crying happy tears about the future stretching out ahead of us like a promise someone actually intended to keep.

But there was one photo that twisted the knife. Daphne holding my hand in a hospital waiting room the night Mama had her scare with chest pains that turned out to be heartburn but felt like the end of the world when I was twenty-two and broke and terrified. Daphne had driven three hours in the middle of the night just to sit with me, brought me coffee that tasted like motor oil and held my hand while I fell apart in a plastic chair that squeaked every time I moved.

"You're not alone," she'd whispered when I'd finally stopped crying long enough to breathe. "You'll never be alone as long as I'm alive."

Had that been real? Or was I just practice for the performance she'd give years later when she needed someone to play the perfect houseguest while she conducted her secret affair?

I traced my finger over her face in the photo, both of us looking so young and innocent and convinced that friendship meant something. We'd sworn we'd be each other's maids of honor, that our kids would grow up together, that we'd be two old ladies sitting on a porch somewhere comparing arthritis medications and arguing about whose turn it was to water the plants.

My journal lay open beside me, and I picked up my pen with hands that shook between anger and grief:

I keep trying to figure out which one of us was the bigger liar. Me, for falling in love with her brother and not telling her? Or her, for inviting me to her family manor not because she wanted to help me, but because she needed cover for her affair with James?

Six years of friendship, and it turns out we were both using each other. I used her trust to hide my feelings for Edward. She used my desperation for a place to stay to hide her relationship with James. The difference is, I fell in love accidentally. She planned this from the beginning.

When she looked at me that last day, with such betrayal and hurt in her eyes, I wanted to scream, "You used me first!" But what would have been the point? We both crossed lines we can't uncross. We both became people our twenty-year-old selves wouldn't recognize.

The grief was physical—my chest tight like someone was sitting on it—but underneath the sadness was an anger that burned as steady as a pilot light.

I mourned the friendship, yes, but I also mourned my own naivety. The girl who'd thought she was being rescued by her best friend instead of recruited as an unwitting accomplice.

Part of me wonders if any of it was real. The late-night conversations, the shared secrets, the way she made me feel like family. Or was I always just the small-town American friend who could be counted on to be grateful and unquestioning and perfectly convenient when she needed me?

I don't know which hurts more—losing her, or realizing I might never have really had her to begin with.

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