Typical.
Let her get the party started and Kev showed up to take over as if it had been his idea all along. But Anna didn’t care. She’d shifted the mood. They were laughing and singing and marching.
Score one for Mom.
The doorbell rang.
Logan left formation, ran for the door, and, before Anna could stop him, flung it wide open.
Anna halted, eyes on her son.
“Mom?” A confused expression crossed Logan’s little face as he looked at the visitor and then at Anna and repeated in a soft, befuddled whisper, “Mommy?”
She shifted her gaze from her son to the thin, spiky-haired, redheaded woman standing on her front porch holding a thick leather dog collar in her hand and appearing as if she’d just scaled Mount Everest to get it.
A complete stranger who looked exactly like her.
Anna’s mouth dropped open and she blinked hard, trying to parse what she was seeing. But it was like the time she took calculus in high school. Nothing made sense no matter how hard she tried to understand it.
Her giggly mind said, You prayed. God answered. Here she is. Your clone.
Literally.
Yeah, be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
The cymbals fell from her hands and hit the floor with a jarring clatter. Everyone jumped, including the clone on her doorstep.
Oh wait. Oh hey. Now she’d figured this out. She was still sound asleep and trapped in some kind of lucid nightmare. That was why it felt so real.
Soon, she soothed herself, soon enough the alarm would go off and everything would return to normal.
But deep inside, a part of Anna knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
Chapter Four
Amelia
The Mirror
Somehow, Amelia didn’t expect Anna to look quite so much like her in person. She thought there would be differences, and there were, but they were cosmetic.
She’d studied Anna’s features in her sister’s social media photo posts, but to actually see herself looking back without benefit of a mirror was, well . . . slightly shocking.
Anna weighed twenty pounds more and had long wavy hair that fell to the middle of her back; her ears were triple pierced, and she had a small diamond nose stud, along with a small butterfly tattoo on her left upper arm.
Amelia’s body pumped a flood of adrenaline. She was hot and cold, sweaty and dry all at the same time.
Anna was Amelia outside of her own body. Seeing her sister’s face for the very first time was remarkable.
I’m not alone, she thought, and a crazy giddiness lightened her heart.
Finally, she was not alone, and it felt so glorious that instant panic wrapped around her throat like a thick fist.
It wasn’t just that her mirror image was staring back at her, it was the entirety of Anna. A sister. At long last.
Amelia was overcome, both joy and fear tangling up inside her. They studied each other like zoo monkeys introduced for the first time.
Anna stared back at Amelia with the same dark chocolate eyes that Amelia used to peer at her. Friends, acquaintances, and even strangers had often commented on the purity of Amelia’s eye color. It was just intense brown, no other hues, shades, highlights, or shadows. And at last, while looking into Anna’s eyes, she got what everyone had been on about.
Pure deep brown eyes were mesmerizing.
In the quiet stillness after the cymbals fell now, she fully understood the concept of deafening silence.
Four openmouthed strangers blinked at her.
No one spoke.
Neither her twin, nor the man that Amelia recognized from social media sleuthing as Anna’s husband, Kevin, nor their kids, Logan and Allie. A nice, normal family.
And she was here to blow up their world.
“Hello,” she said as calmly as if she were interviewing for a job that she didn’t care whether she got or not. “My name is Amelia Brandt and I know this is a shock, but I’m your sister. Your twin sister. Your identical twin sister. Might I come in?”
No one moved.
Then, her niece—it was the first time Amelia thought about the child in the context of being related to her—spoke.
“Why are you holding Cujo’s collar? What did you do to Cujo?” Her voice filled with preteen indignation. “Where is my dog?!”
The girl looked like her father, blond, Nordic, broad shouldered. She was almost as tall as her mother, five foot six. Amelia knew because it was her height, too, and something told her that muscular Allie was very good at sports
It surprised Amelia how much being misunderstood by this girl hurt. Especially since it had taken such a supreme emotional will for Amelia to rescue the Doberman.
Amelia extended the collar to Allie and watched small black bristles of dog hair drift to the doormat that said Welcome, Y’all.
Glowering, Allie snatched the collar away, her bottom lip trembling, her eyes fearful and angry. “What. Did. You. Do?”
“Allie,” Anna finally spoke, gripping her daughter’s shoulder. “You’re being rude. Let her tell you what happened.”
Allie folded her arms over her chest, the dog collar clutched in her fingers.
“The dog’s collar got hung on the fence T-post and it was choking him. I took the collar off,” Amelia explained as if it had been just that easy, instead of the most monumental thing she’d done since picking up the phone and calling Dr. Ellard for help.
Allie’s eyes widened and her grip on the collar tightened. “Oh,” she said, looking a bit sheepish. “I’m sorry. Is Cujo okay?”
Amelia nodded. “He’s fine now, but you might consider a breakaway collar.”
Allie flew past her, sailing down the steps and running over the cobblestone walkway toward the Doberman’s pen, calling, “Cujo! Cujo! You poor boy!”
Amelia switched her attention back to Anna. The color had returned to her twin’s cheeks, but she was still staring in stunned disbelief.
“You’re my sister?” Anna asked, repeating what Amelia had said earlier. “My twin sister? My identical twin sister?”
Amelia waited patiently for it to sink in. She understood the shock. She’d gone through a similar reaction three days ago.
“Thank you for rescuing Cujo,” the tall, handsome blond man said. Her brother-in-law, Kevin, was the first to recover equilibrium. “Won’t you come in Miss? Mrs.? Brandt?”
Please and thank you. Polite Texas manners and hospitality. Politeness made Amelia twitchy. It felt like a cover-up for real emotions. Generally, she much preferred blunt honesty.
“It’s Ms.,” she murmured.
Kevin stepped forward and held out a hand.
She stared at it.
“It’s safe,” he said, mistaking her reluctance as concern about spreading germs instead of what it was. Social anxiety.
Warily, she took his hand.
He used the handshake to gently tug her over the threshold into the foyer with the rest of them, and she wasn’t sure she liked that, either.
The boy, Logan, clung to his mother’s hand and eyed Amelia suspiciously. “Who you?”
Was she supposed to explain it all over again? Amelia didn’t know how to interact with children. She’d never been around them, not even when she was a child.
“You not my mommy.” Logan widened his stance to match his father’s, crossed his chubby little arms over his chest.