A dreadful certainty beats hard inside my chest now, and I find that I can’t speak.
El lets me off the hook again, takes my hands and gives me a small smile. ‘I told her all of it. All of the Plan: Ross, the pills, the boat. I don’t know why. Maybe because, deep down, I wanted someone to stop me. And I was glad she’d forced my hand. I think the moment I answered that phone, I ran right out of courage.’ Her smile is terrible. ‘I scuttled myself.’
When I still say nothing, El squeezes my hands harder.
‘Even after I told her, I was shaky, panicky. I guess I was still coming down from adrenaline, cortisol, I don’t know, whatever it is your body thinks you need when you’re about to kill yourself.’ She shivers. ‘But I promised her it was over. That I wouldn’t do it, that I’d go back to Ross. I talked and talked at her like she was our cabin girl again. Our skivvy. Our comfort blanket. Like she wasn’t a person. A person who had suffered. A person who only ever wanted to belong, to be needed. To help.’ El shivers again. ‘I didn’t stop. Not until I was done. Not until I’d taken as much comfort and sympathy as she had to give. And then I left her alone in the cuddy. While I went back up top, kept sailing for a bit longer, until I felt ready to go back to the harbour.’ She closes her eyes. ‘I was relieved. That’s the ugly truth of it. Of me. I was relieved. I’d tried. I’d failed. And now I could go back home.
‘It was too quiet when I went back down about an hour later. I knew something was wrong. Mouse was lying on her back on the seats. And she was … she was just grey. She was this awful grey. And I just knew. Even before I saw the bag on the floor. The diazepam and the fluoxetine, Ross’s fucking pills. My suicide kit. I tried bringing her back, but she was already going cold.’ She shakes her head, and when she looks at me again, it’s with that familiar mix of sorrow and defiance. ‘I saw it then. My chance. I could sail back to Granton, face Ross – all the questions and consequences of Mouse being dead, of me being on the boat when I’d begged him to come back from London. Or I really could escape. Him. All of it. Everything at once.’
I think of that body on a stretcher. The white of its skin, the black of the closing stitches at the ends of its collarbone. Its terrible face.
El’s fingers tremble against mine as she swallows hard. ‘I decided to substitute Mouse for me.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ I say. It’s a lie. I want to get up, I want to run. I don’t want to listen. But El won’t let go of my hands, my wrists. ‘I don’t—’
‘There always had to be a body,’ she says, and she’s actively pushing me down now, as if she knows if she lets up for a moment, I’ll escape. ‘If one wasn’t found, I knew Ross would never give up, he’d never stop looking. And maybe he’d never be found guilty. It was why I’d decided I had to kill myself. But as soon as I realised I didn’t have to die, I didn’t want to. I could go back to the house, replace the drain plug and hole saw in Bluebeard’s Room with the real ones, so that the forensics would match without any margin of doubt. I could get my Survival Pack. And I could escape. Really escape.’ She looks at me, suddenly fierce. ‘But I didn’t want it to happen like that. I didn’t want her to die.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I say again, now twisting my wrists so hard, so frantically, that a bone cracks loud enough to make both of us wince. But El doesn’t let go. Instead, she only moves closer until we’re inches apart; until I have no option but to meet her hard gaze.
‘Yes, you do. And you have to face that this time, Cat. You have to know the truth and believe it. Accept it. Even if you don’t want to.’ She lets me go. ‘You have to say it.’
I breathe in. Out. Think of that body on the stretcher again. That DNA isolation test on Rafiq’s phone. ‘She’s our sister.’ I stare down at the purple crescent-shaped welts on my skin. ‘Mouse is our identical sister.’
El takes my face in her hands, smooths cool fingers against my brow, my temples. There are tears in her eyes, but she’s smiling. Nodding. ‘Do you remember how special we were?’ she says. ‘More than one hundred thousand other children had to be born before a mum got to have children as special as us?’
I nod. Close my eyes.
‘The odds of giving birth to Mirror Twins are about one in twelve hundred births. For a fraternal twin like Mum, the odds drop to one in seventy.’ El lets out a long breath. ‘It’s not that rare at all.’
I think of Mouse curled up into a ball behind a lashed-down barrel in the bow of the Satisfaction, her chalk-white face streaked with tears. And my selfish, stupid belief that the envy in her eyes was only to make me feel better – to let me know that I was worth something to someone. Even if that someone wasn’t real. I wish I was like you.
‘The Witch told Mouse just before she died.’ El’s face is so pale. ‘That we were identical triplets. That her grandpa was her father, and our mother was her mother.’
‘But how?’ I think of Mouse’s raw pale skin and cropped dark hair, her bony smallness. I can still feel my denial like a
