My Twin Stole My Fiancée and Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Intruder
Calvin walks into his own home and his twin calls the police on him. His parents and fiancée say nothing. At the station he learns a protective order against him was signed three weeks ago.
I flew home on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, a week early, to surprise my family.
I hadn't told anyone, not even my fiancée.
I had a pumpkin pie from the bakery in one hand and my house key in the other.
The key was brass and worn, and I'd carried it since I was twelve.
The front door stuck at the end, so I shoved it, the way I always had.
My twin sister, Natasha, was standing in the hall with her phone in her hand.
She saw me and her whole face lit up.
"Cal! You're a week early." She squeezed my arm around the pie box. "Mom is going to cry. Stay right there, I just have one call to make."
She lifted the phone to her ear and looked straight at me.
"I need to report a break-in," she said. "There's an intruder in my house."
I laughed. I thought it was a joke.
Then she gave the address and said, "He's still here. Please hurry."
"Tasha, it's me," I said. "Cut it out."
She didn't smile. She backed into the living room and kept talking to the dispatcher.
On the wall beside me hung the photo of two newborns in one blanket.
Mom has told the same story at every birthday of ours, that Natasha came first by four minutes.
Dad has always studied his shoes while she tells it.
I followed Natasha into the living room.
My mother was on the couch. My father stood by the fireplace. Monique sat in the armchair with my ring on her finger.
All three of them looked at me and none of them moved.
"Dad," I said. "Tell her it's me."
My father looked at the carpet.
"Mom?"
My mother folded her hands in her lap.
I turned to Monique. I had asked her to marry me two years ago, in a parking lot, in the rain.
Her eyes went to Natasha first. Then they dropped.
The police got there fast.
Two officers came through the door, a man and a woman, hands on their belts.
The woman had a dark braid and a hard, tired face.
"Sir, show me your hands. Now."
"My name is Calvin Ellingwood. I live here. That's my sister, that's my mother and father."
"Hands."
I put them up, and the pie box slid out of my fingers and hit the floor.
The woman spun me around and the cuffs went on tight, one click and then another.
The metal bit my wrists.
"Officer, my license is in my back pocket," I said. "The address on it is this house."
"You can tell it to the desk."
"Check it. It only takes a second."
She didn't check it.
"Ma'am," she said to my sister, "do you know this man?"
"He's been sending threats for weeks," Natasha said. Her voice shook a little, and it sounded rehearsed.
I had never sent her a threat in my life.
"Monique," I said. "Tell them."
The male officer turned to her. "Ma'am, do you know him?"
Monique twisted my ring around her finger.
"No," she said. "I've never seen him before."
It was very quiet in that room.
"You're wearing my ring," I said.
Nobody answered.
The female officer pulled my arm and walked me to the door.
"Mom," I said. "Dad."
My mother said, "Just take him, please. Before the neighbors see."
The neighbors had already seen.
Across the street our neighbor was holding her curtain open with one hand.
Two kids on bikes had stopped at the end of our driveway to watch.
I looked back once.
Natasha stood in the doorway with her phone in her hand and her face wet, and she was not crying.
She watched me go with a flat, satisfied face.
That was when I stopped yelling.
If I kept shouting, all I'd be to them was the man screaming outside the Ellingwood house.
So I lowered my voice and said to the officer, "I'm not resisting. I want my phone, my license and my one call."
She kept walking.
The back seat of the cruiser smelled like old coffee and bleach.
At the station they took my belt, my wallet and my pocket knife, and sat me on a metal bench.
The desk sergeant ran my license and frowned at his screen.
"Ellingwood. Calvin J.," he said. "Same address as the call."
"That's my house."
"It is."
For a second I thought it was over.
Then he turned the monitor toward the woman with the braid.
"Lark, look at this. There's a protective order on him."
The badge on her chest said CARMODY. She read the screen over his shoulder.
"Filed three weeks ago by Natasha Ellingwood," he said. "Her parents, Harold and Joan Ellingwood, signed as witnesses."
I felt the bench go out from under me.
Three weeks ago, I had been on a bridge in Colorado, and my family had been signing papers to keep me out of my own front door.
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