A Grave Beneath the Floorboards novel · Chapter 10 of 24
Chapter 10: The Twelfth
They put me behind a pane of one-way glass and told me to stay quiet.
On the other side of it, the woman sat at a metal table with her hands in her lap and her hair coming loose from its clip.
Under the hard light she looked older than she had at the bar.
She looked tired in a way Carly never had, and I could see it now that she had stopped trying to be her.
Burke sat down across from her.
"Name," he said.
"Peyton Keelan," she said. Her voice was rough and low. "I changed it. I had a different last name my whole life, and Keelan is the one I went looking for."
"Why?"
"Because it's hers."
She didn't have to say whose.
I stood with my palm against the glass.
"Carly had a sister," Burke said.
"A twin." Peyton looked at the table. "Identical. We were born on the twelfth of September, in a county hospital in Dayton. Our mother was nineteen, and she couldn't keep us both."
I stopped breathing.
"They kept one," she said. "They gave me away."
On the other side of the glass, nothing moved.
I heard the heating vent tick, and in my own ears I heard Carly say, a thousand times, I'll have my party on the thirteenth, I just like it that way.
I had never asked.
"I found her two years ago," Peyton went on. "I did one of those spit tests. She was in the database, and the screen said sister, and I threw up in my kitchen sink."
"And she wanted to meet?"
"She cried on the phone for an hour." A smile pulled at Peyton's mouth and went away. "She said she always had a hole in her, and she never knew where it came from."
Keep reading free with an account. Start A Grave Beneath the Floorboards from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.
← Chapter 9 · All chapters · Chapter 11 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend