“Well, if you have it all figured out …” She trailed off, but I could hear the pain in her voice. I felt that same pain in my heart.
How could I change her when I could barely change myself? I’d always been the good one, and I never veered away from it even when I knew I wanted to take more risks and live my life. I couldn’t fault her for not being able to change herself either.
Except my life didn’t hurt others, and maybe that’s why my resentment toward her pushed more hateful things from my mouth. “Figured out? I’m in jail because of you. I hope it was worth it. Did you get paid a lot, or was it just to keep up your status in whatever shitty group you’ve been hanging out with?”
“Lilah, go to sleep. You’re being a bitch.” She said it softly, but the words still stung.
“Do you even want to apologize for this?” I threw back. “I’m a bitch because I finally stopped being gullible after all this time. I’m finally siding with our family. You’re the addict, and you’ve been dragging us down because you won’t go out and get help. Grow up. Take accountability. Be sorry.” I wasn’t ever confrontational with her. Never had been really. Maybe the shock of it had her mad enough to respond.
“Fine!” she yelled, cutting me off as she whipped her head over the side of the bed so I could see her glare at me.
I gasped when I saw tears streaming down her face. Izzy never cried. I did. And she was always there hugging me when it happened. We were allies even if we didn’t hang out in the same crowds. I was the yin to her yang. Sweet to her spicy. Tame to her wild. Twin sisters against the world. I’d believed her for so long.
Maybe it was the heartbreak of her lying to me or that our bond was truly severed here and now, but tears slid down my cheeks too as she said, “I’m sorry for all of it, okay? What do you want me to say? That I’m a fuckup? Sure. I was always the black sheep. Mom didn’t even think she was going to have me, Lilah. Five D names and a left over I, right?”
My mother only got one ultrasound without health insurance and Izzy had hidden behind me. When I was born, they’d quickly informed my mother of another child. She’d named her Isabel rather than another D name. I didn’t think it bothered her but I guess it had.
“I didn’t care about school or my life like you did,” she continued. “You had it all, and I had some friends, okay? People liked me just for my fun personality and it meant more than school, okay? I don’t really know how that’s possible, just that it is. I always felt beneath all of you, and somehow you always climbed up that happiness pole and found the freaking sun when I was left clawing through the darkness.”
Her apology didn’t appease me. It made me feel worse for what I’d said before, my words curdling in my stomach and souring like rotting milk.
I wasn’t always happy, wasn’t always perfect.
I just didn’t share my sadness with any of them.
“That’s not true,” I whispered. She didn’t know about the days in college where I couldn’t see a thing because I’d been sucked into a black hole of pain that didn’t seem to ever let up.
She didn’t know I’d carried a baby. A baby that I’d lost.
Nobody did.
“Oh, whatever,” she scoffed and flew back over the side of her mattress. “Don’t try to paint me a picture of you not doing well, Delilah. You always have and you always will.”
It wasn’t the time to share my own demons. I needed to be strong for both of us, so I didn’t respond to her.
I let her drift off to sleep while I cried silently below her that night, wasting my tears on a twin sister who I wasn’t sure knew how to love me back the same way I loved her.
6
Pick Up Your Ex
Dante
I’d worked with the authorities to get Delilah out quickly. My clearance within the United States made them willing. Had they given me any trouble, I would have just called my family. They were the ones that really ran the United States, government be damned. Money was power, and the Armanellis had most of it.
Delilah didn’t know that side of the family, though. To her, my name was Dante Reid.
Not Armanelli. Not the mob.
And she wouldn’t be figuring it out today. I already knew our story was going to be too tough for her to handle. Anyone who learned their friend was working undercover with their sister was going to have a hard time.
Not that I’d call Delilah a friend at this point.
I don’t know if it was ever right to call her a friend. She was too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for hanging around Izzy, me, and her brothers.