He Chose My Twin, So I Walked Away novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Her Voice

At breakfast the app Amy built reads her words in Jenna's voice, and her father admits he gave Grandma's money for her operation to Josh.

I shook my head at Josh.

Just once, hard.

"It's already done," he said. "We recorded her in March. Twelve hours of samples. The new voice model is live in the test build."

March.

It was May.

I signed to my sister, "March?"

Jenna glanced at my parents. They couldn't read it. She answered out loud anyway.

"We've been talking since Christmas," she said. "He messaged me first."

"You messaged me," Josh said, and laughed.

"Oh, who cares who messaged who," my mother said. "Look at you two."

At Christmas I had posted one photo of Josh and me at the rink downtown.

Jenna had liked it.

I had thought that was nice of her.

I went upstairs to my old bedroom and shut the door.

There was no lock. There had never been a lock on my door.

Jenna's door had one.

I lay on top of the comforter in my graduation dress and listened.

You can hear everything in that house.

I heard my mother put the cake away. I heard Josh's laugh in the den.

I heard Jenna's door shut, and then open, and then the den door shut.

Around midnight, I heard my father's voice in the kitchen, low.

Then Josh's. "Sir, I can't tell you what this means."

Then the scratch of a pen, and a chair pushed in.

I didn't sleep.

In the morning my phone was on the kitchen counter, next to the toaster, like I had left it there myself.

My mother was making pancakes.

Jenna sat at the table in Josh's quarter-zip sweater, with her bare feet on his chair.

Josh was setting up his tablet against the fruit bowl.

"Morning," he said, like it was any morning. "Sit down. I want you to hear this."

I didn't sit down.

My father came in with the newspaper and didn't open it.

"Okay," Josh said. "Amy, type something. Anything you want."

He held the tablet out to me.

My app was open on it. My blue icon, the one I had drawn myself at two in the morning in the library.

I didn't take it.

"Fine, I'll do it." He scrolled through something on his phone. "Here. You sent me this our first winter."

He typed it in.

Good morning. I love you. Drive safe.

He pressed the button.

Jenna's voice came out of the tablet.

"Good morning. I love you. Drive safe."

It was warm and a little husky, with a smile in it.

It was my sentence.

It was her mouth.

My mother put the spatula down.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, Mark."

Her eyes filled up.

"That's what she'd sound like," my mother said. "That's exactly what she'd sound like."

She came around the counter and put her arms around me from behind, and I stood there inside them.

She had not hugged me at graduation.

"Do another one," Jenna said.

Josh typed. Thank you, Mom.

"Thank you, Mom," said my sister's voice from the fruit bowl.

My mother made a sound into my shoulder.

I took my phone off the counter and typed with my thumbs, fast.

I didn't press speak. I turned the screen to Josh.

"Take her voice out of my app."

He read it and gave me the patient look he gave professors.

"It's not just your app, Amy. It's the company. The company is Rinehart Speakeasy."

"I wrote it."

"And I registered it. I did the filings. I did forty pitch meetings while you sat in the library."

He smiled.

"We're a team. You're the engineer. That's huge."

"Then the engineer says no."

"Investors don't fund engineers," he said. "They fund stories."

"A girl who was born deaf and fought her way back, giving her twin a voice? That's a story."

"And now we've got the money to tell it."

I typed, "What money?"

Josh looked at my father.

My father folded the newspaper in half, and then in half again.

"Sit down, Amy," he said.

I didn't.

He pushed his glasses up.

"Your grandmother's account," he said. "I wrote Josh a check last night. For the seed round."

I knew exactly how much was in my grandmother's account.

Sixty thousand dollars.

She had left it to me when she died in 2021.

It was the only thing anyone in my family had ever left only to me.

Her lawyer had read the line out loud in a room full of aunts and cousins.

For Amy's voice.

My father was supposed to hold it until I turned twenty-five.

I signed it to him slowly, because I wanted him to have to understand every word.

"That was for my operation."

He watched my hands. His jaw went tight.

He understood it.

"Your grandmother left that money for your voice," he said.

He nodded at the tablet propped against the fruit bowl, still lit up with my blue icon.

"And now you have one."

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