The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [68]
My eyes go wide I’m so surprised. I look at her carefully, wondering how she would even know to ask such a thing. I can’t figure out what emotion’s in her voice. If she’s angry or hurt or sad or confused or amused. I can’t tell at all what she’s feeling and it frustrates me because we’re twins. We’re supposed to know each other almost better than ourselves.
“He was a brother to me,” I murmur—a safe response. “Of course I love him.”
“That’s not what I mean, Annah,” she says. That same tone. It stirs a memory of when we were kids, how she was always more serious about things than I was. I wonder if that’s still true.
“You love him the same way I do now,” she says. I can tell she feels awkward asking but even so she sets her jaw, waiting for the answer and not apologizing for the question.
I don’t respond. My first instinct is to shout at her that there’s no way she can love him like I did. That I know him so much more than she does. I grew up with him. I survived the Forest with him. I’ve lived with him since we were children, barely alive and struggling to figure out this world with no help. I’ve stayed up all night with him on the roof counting stars.
I know him better than he knows himself, and she can never be the same to him as I am. As I was.
But I don’t say anything. Because I realize that these are things I used to feel. They’re more of a habit now, born of so many years of waiting for him to come home. Of once thinking I needed him to be safe.
I’m not sure I understand what love is anymore. Seeing the way my sister and Elias are around each other, I’m starting to realize that it’s so much more—so much deeper—than what I expected.
“Did he know you loved him?” she asks.
I think about the night before he left. Of him skimming his fingers over my body. He had to have known then.
I shrug.
She leans her head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling soaring above. “He talked about you with such … fervor in his voice. He was desperate to find you,” she says.
I can’t help but snort, especially since I now know that wasn’t the case. That he’d stayed on with the Recruiters rather than come home to me.
“You know he lied about that, right?” I ask her. “That he never came looking for me. He was with the Recruiters the whole time.”
Her face clouds and she shrugs. “He did what he had to.” I wonder if she believes her own words. Or if this is what you do when you love someone: accept their bad decisions along with their good ones.
“He called you beautiful and strong and sweet,” she adds softly.
I keep my voice even and calm as my heart ricochets through my body. “He clearly lied.”
She rolls her head along the wall until she’s facing me. Her expression is somber and serious. “Do you hate me?”
Immediately I open my mouth to tell her no but I swallow the word down. Do I hate her?
Yes. I hate her for living a comfortable life. For falling that day on the path and letting me leave her behind. For growing up with a mother. For not having been tangled in barbed wire and becoming hideously scarred.
For showing me what I could have been if I hadn’t turned cold and dark and hollow.
But of course none of that’s her fault. She couldn’t control the fact that she tripped that day on the path. She’s not the one who forced me to walk away, who forced me to choose Elias over her.
“I don’t hate you for loving Elias,” I tell her truthfully. After all, we’re twins—it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve both loved the same man.
If I ever truly loved him to begin with.
She shifts until she’s kneeling in front of me, and I still can’t read her expression. She keeps herself so well guarded. I wonder if I’m the same way. I feel as though I’m a storm inside and the waves of it can be seen in my eyes.
“I want to understand who you are now, Annah,” she says. “I’ve forgotten everything about who we used to be, but we’re still sisters. We’re twins. That means something to me. I want to mean something to you as well. I want to be friends.” She lowers her eyes as if she’s afraid of how I’ll respond.
I stand up so fast that specks