Chapter 15: The Twin

Lila was waiting in the hospital chapel at eight, alone, in a gray hoodie with the hood down.

It was a small room with six pews and a window of colored glass that nobody had cleaned.

She had come in a cab again. She had paid for it herself this time, with a card she held up like proof.

"Mother doesn't know I'm here," she said. "Daddy thinks I'm asleep in my room."

"You look like death."

"I know. It's very flattering." She tried to smile and did not manage it. "Can I sit?"

I sat in the pew across the aisle, and she sat a body's width away from me.

"I read it," she said. "The file. A nurse printed it for me from the doctor's drawer."

"Then you know."

"I know what you were being kept for," Lila said.

Her voice was thin, but it didn't wobble.

"I've been sitting in my bed doing the math. Every October I got a new set of numbers, and so did you."

"Is that what you came to say?"

"No." She folded her hands in her lap. "I came to say that I won't take it."

I didn't move.

"If they ask you again, you can tell them I said no first," she said. "I'm refusing. In writing, tomorrow."

"Lila, you have three weeks."

"I'll go on the list like anybody else. Like the people in the waiting room who don't have a sister in a file."

"That could take months."

"I may not have months." She looked at the colored glass.

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