Page 2 of Chance
Now, I was able to do…
Well, anything.
There were no locked doors to keep me inside.No guard to restrict me from leaving.No stern father to guilt and gaslight me into thinking I was ungrateful, unworthy.Nothing.Or worse—broken—and the world would never accept me.
You’re nothing, Evelyn.Without me, you’ll always be nothing.
Fuck off, asshole.
I was still working on figuring out if I was actually broken or not.Twenty-one years of being locked away from society, except that blessed one day a year when I would get to see my twin, kinda destroyed a person’s…everything.
When our parents divorced, they split everything down the middle, including their children.Each parent got one twin and went their separate ways.We hadn’t lived some weird version ofThe Parent Trap,hadn’t even considered doing the whole switching places thing, despite the two of us being so identical there wasn’t a person alive who could tell us apart.Least of all William.He’d been so paranoid about us possibly pulling a stunt like that, that he would mark me with a Sharpie before our annual visit.
If it hadn’t been for the judge making it a stipulation that we had to spend our birthday together, we might never have even known about each other, let alone bonded.Maybe they had seen something in my father’s eyes.His need to control.His madness.Or perhaps the judge was just trying to look out for the unborn babies that were still in our mother’s belly.
Whatever the reason, I was grateful.
Per the judge’s order, neither of our parents was allowed to attend those supervised “playdates.”It took me years to understand that it was because our parents got volatile when in the same room.Evy, however, seemed to figure that out much sooner than I did.How, she never explained to me, and I’d been a little afraid to ask.
We didn’t talk much about our parents during our visitation days.That always seemed the least important subject to discuss when we were so desperate to soak in being with each other.A few short hours together for a single day out of a year starved us both for the connection we craved.Three hundred and sixty-four days was an eternity when you were missing the other half of yourself.
Diving into the drama that had ended our parents’ marriage before we were even born was unessential in the face of breathing each other’s air for our brief time together.
Which had been a mistake neither of us truly understood until we were in our teens.Me, because I didn’t know any better.Evy, because she didn’t know how much I was suffering.
To be fair, I didn’t know I was suffering either.Not then.It took a while before I came to that realization on my own.
Our mother’s death right before we were set to graduate from high school had blindsided us.Every plan we’d made to be with each other when we turned eighteen had been waylaid.We were only a few months shy of our birthday, the end of our separation so close we could almost touch it.Adulthood meant going out on our own, college, seeing the world outside of what little I was allowed to watch on Netflix.
With our mother’s death, I thought that would automatically mean my sister would come to live with us.
I’d been wrong.
That day was forever burned into my mind.Not so much because I’d lost my mother, a woman I had no memories of.She’d never once been in my life and, as far as I was aware, hadn’t made any attempt to try to have a relationship with me.Other than a few moments of considering the what-ifs of what it might have been like to have a mother to turn to in those scary times a girl needed an adult female mentor to hold on to, I hadn’t felt much regarding her when I was told of her passing.
And even those what-ifs were based on things I’d seen on television rather than witnessing mother-daughter relationships in real life.That was kind of hard to do when my dad kept me so sheltered I was homeschooled via an online curriculum for my entire education.
Evy was the one I hurt for.She was the one who needed me.I could feel it all the way to my bones.Her pain reached me even across the distance that separated us.It lived inside me to the point that I didn’t know where her emotions ended and mine began.It was so gut-wrenching, confusing, soul-crippling.
And then Dad told me that Evy wasn’t welcome in his house.
We didn’t even attend Mom’s funeral.
Heartless bastard.
I might not have even known about my mother’s passing if cops hadn’t shown up at the door and refused to leave until they personally informed me.William had been pissed about it, his entire body seeming to vibrate with rage as he stood at my side in the foyer while the two uniformed officers had explained what had happened to the woman who’d birthed me.
After her funeral, Evy was sent to live with Mom’s aunt Mildred in Los Angeles until we turned eighteen.We had one more birthday together.During that final visit, nothing went as planned.Our life together didn’t magically begin like we’d always promised each other it would.I didn’t leave there with my sister.If anything, I left a piece of myself behind.
I lost Evy that day…
I lost myself.
That was when it really hit me how wrong my life was.How much I was missing.That was when a piece of me died inside.
Grabbing my hand, Evy didn’t give me a chance to let Dad’s voice get too loud in my mind, constantly telling me “no” or that I had to be careful.Or that no one wanted me around.That I was defective.Nothing.There was a time when I’d hidden from life, the entire world, because of him.Now, I didn’t have to do that any longer.
Throwing the already partially open front door wide, she tugged me outside.
