The Twin They Erased novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Cards
Nobody in the hall could tell us apart.
I felt it in the way they looked, from her face to mine and back.
Then Tilda took her hand off Eamon's mother's arm and stood alone.
"Tilly," Odile said, and her voice was sweet again. "Darling. You're not well."
"I am much better than I've been in seven years," Tilda said. "Three days of sweating in a farmhouse will do that. You should try it."
A ripple of breath went round the girls along the wall.
The chairman leaned forward.
"Miss Astley. You are the younger of the two?"
"By a few minutes. I'm Tilda."
"And the young woman at the foot of the table?"
"Is my sister Willa." She looked at me and her eyes filled, but her voice stayed steady. "I have never sent her a card."
"The cards are a symptom," the doctor said quickly. "She has a history of confabulation."
"Do I?" Tilda said.
She turned to me and held out her hand.
I took the blue ballpoint out of my sleeve, the one with the chewed cap, and put it in her fingers.
She leaned over the oak table, took a sheet of the chairman's own paper and wrote.
It took a long time, because her hand shook.
When she finished, she turned the page around for the old man.
Willa, I have never sent you a card.
The W had a loop at the bottom of the last stroke.
"That is ink," Tilda said. "I have not been allowed ink for seven years, only a pen I stole and kept in a hem. My aunt held my wrist when I signed her papers. She told me you hated me. She came into my room every spring with a pencil and wrote you my name."
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