“Drama?” It was a single word, but the only thing that could come to her lips. Tara started for their bed.
“Whatever. Your puke really stinks. I don’t know how I’m supposed to sleep around here. Thanks for nothing. God, I hate this place.”
The dreams started then. The nightmares. Whatever they were. Tori didn’t come back the next morning. In fact, she never did. Tori told her father that she just couldn’t go back to “that place,” that it “hurt too much” to see her sister that way. Tori let Lainie serve out her sentence. Dex O’Neal had no idea what had happened, that the switch had been made. When he saw his daughter in the correctional facility later, he remarked about her new look.
“You cut your hair like your sister,” he said.
“Yeah, it was getting too long,” Lainie said.
“I love it.” The sisters never talked about what had transpired the last time they ever switched places as twins. Tori ran across Daniel Hector at the Safeway on Bethel Avenue one time, and he approached her.
“Your sister was a total bitch,” he said.
“You said she was going to be hot stuff. Fun stuff. That she was into a sexy, fun scene.”
“Didn’t you have fun?”
“She practically threw me on to the floor.”
“She’s a fighter.”
“She was a bitch. I’m glad I’ve got you to mess around with.” She smiled. It wasn’t a real smile, but he was too stupid to know.
“Those were good times. Freaky, but good.”
When Daniel Hector was arrested for molesting a ten-year-old girl three years later, it opened a Pandora’s box of other accusations. There were some suspicions from the staff at the Secure Crisis Residential Center in Port Orchard, but no one really had anything conclusive. The girls in 7-Pod had turned over to a new group three times since Lainie as Tori O’Neal walked free. Lainie was in college studying journalism when she saw the item in the paper, but she resisted the urge to dial the Kitsap County Prosecutor’s Office. While it was true that she didn’t want to be thought of as a victim, neither did she want anyone to know that she’d been duped by her sister. She was damaged goods. Raped. Abused. Tori had faded away after her release and the time between visits with what was left of their family lengthened. The only time she saw her sister was in her dreams.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Tacoma
Tori Connelly paced the house, starting in the master bedroom, then the guest room, down the hall, and to the stairs. Everything in that old Victorian was perfection. On the first floor she lingered in the kitchen looking at all the things she had amassed. The best appliances. An antique paella pan from Spain that hung on the wall cost more than two thousand dollars. She didn’t even cook and never intended to learn. She was going to have to leave all of what she’d fought so hard to get. She was going to have to pray that her sister and Kendall Stark didn’t talk. Kendall was digging into her affairs. Lainie was poking around in things that she should leave alone. And Parker had been a fool. I’ve been through more than any of those idiots can imagine. If they knew what I’d faced, they would back off and give me some space, she thought. I don’t deserve this. She went back upstairs to her phone. Her heart was racing a little, a feeling that she did not appreciate at all. She dialed Parker’s number. It went to voice mail.
“Baby, I was just thinking about you. About us,” she began.
“We have to go now.” She hung up and continued to review the house that would never again be her home. She went into the living room where she’d pointed the gun at the back of Alex’s head and kick-started the series of incidents that was the middle of her plan. Not the beginning. She smiled. She knew that she’d never come back to the old Victorian that she had been her dream. It had reminded her of the dollhouse that she, her sister, and the other girls in juvy had worked on, and owning it was a big F-U to all of those who’d hurt her. Her mother. Her father. Her sister. Her husbands. She examined herself in the mirror. She looked pretty in an ordinary way. Her hair no longer golden, but some color that approximated averageness, something she never wanted to be. Inside her purse, she’d packed plane tickets, five grand, and the code to her Bahamian bank account. She drew a deep breath and reminded herself that the best plans in the world had to be fluid. She knew that, but taking that deep inside once more was necessary. She understood the power of adapting and changing. Steady, Tori. The only person who should know someone’s next move is the one holding the cards. She set a single overnight bag on the front step and turned the key in the deadbolt. Tori went inside the carriage house and shut the door. She could hear Alex’s voice as he told her that he no longer loved her, that he wanted out of their marriage. She’d begged him to reconsider, though she really was only buying time. She climbed into the deep, dark leather seats of her Lexus and shut the door. Then she screamed as loudly as she could. 
As she dealt with another sleepless night, Lainie’s thoughts fell to her sketchy memories of Zach Campbell. She’d remembered how excited her sister had been when she announced that she was going to marry the former navy officer based in Bremerton. Tori had met him when she was a casino singer at the Clearwater in Suquamish. He was handsome, almost two decades older. His chiseled good looks had softened with age a little, but with brown eyes and a full head of sandy hair—so full that some wondered if it had been a toupee, which it wasn’t—he was a charmer.
“Aren’t you worried that he’s a little, you know, old?” Lainie asked when her sister met her at a Port Orchard coffee shop on Bay Street. They were barely in their twenties and their relationship had slowly ebbed since high school. Lainie had gone to Western Washington University in the northern part of the state. Though Tori was given her high school diploma, it came with the tarnish of having finished her education in juvenile detention. Neither had ever acknowledged it was Tori who walked at graduation as Lainie. So much had never been discussed. The crash. The prison. The switch. All had turned them into friendly adversaries, not sisters.
“I was a little concerned, at first,” Tori said, of Zach’s age.
“But he told me that age is nothing but a number. Besides he’s financially secure and that matters. I don’t have a career like someone I know.”
“Just so you know, reporters make less than teachers,” Lainie said. Tori shrugged.
“Casino singers make less than just about anyone, Lainie.”
“Very funny. Don’t you want a family someday?”
“He’s old, not dead, Lainie. And maybe a baby sometime. I’m not in a hurry.”
“What about the wedding? When and where?” Tori held up her ring finger. Set in a thin platinum band was a one-carat square-cut diamond that sparkled like a midnight star. It was an ostentatious stone that was meant to draw gasps and envy. And it did.
“We were married last weekend in Las Vegas.”
“Oh . . . congratulations.”
“We’d always planned on being maids of honor for each other. We’d talked of a double wedding. Remember how the other would wait for her sister?”
“That was before,” Tori said.
“Before the accident. Before Mom died. I just want to get out of Kitsap as fast as I can. Zach is my ticket out.”
“That sounds lovey-dovey.”
“You can think whatever you want to think, Lainie. Just remember that when I’m gone, no one will look at you and think that you’re me. The scorn or pity or whatever it is that is passed in your direction by mistake will vanish.” Lainie thought a moment, choosing her words carefully.
“Because you’re going to vanish.” Tori let out a breath.
“Something like that,” she said.
CHAPTER FORTY
Port Orchard
