Chapter 3
"I don't know who you are," I said, my voice dropping to a low, venomous whisper that barely disturbed the quiet of the room. "I don't know what grifter circuit you crawled out of, or who paid for that surgery to fix your nose and mimic my sister's collarbone. But you made a mistake coming to this house."
The girl tilted her head. A faint, terrible smile touched the corners of her lips—a smile that looked eerily like Daisy's, yet held a malice Daisy had never possessed.
"A mistake?" she murmured, taking a slow step toward me. "Is that any way to speak to your little sister? After ten years apart?"
"You are not Daisy."
"Mom thinks I am," she whispered, leaning closer. The smell of her skin was wrong. The shape of her shadow was wrong. "Dad wept into my lap. Sheriff Miller called it a miracle. If I have her face, her jacket, her scars, and her memories... who are you to tell them otherwise?"
"I know what you are," I hissed, stepping directly into her space until our faces were inches apart. "You're a scavenger. You saw an open wound in a broken family and thought you could milk an inheritance out of two sick, desperate old people."
The girl didn't back down. Instead, her smile deepened, cutting into her cheeks like a scar.
"Are you afraid of losing their love, Clara?" she whispered, her eyes boring into mine with an unnerving, predatory intensity. "Or are you afraid of what happens when I finally remember the night I left?"
My pulse hammered once, violent and heavy, against my ribs.
"You don't remember anything," I said coldly. "Because you weren't there."
"Memories are funny things," she murmured, her gaze dropping to the floor between us, then slowly rising back to my throat. "Sometimes they stay buried in the mud for years. Under the wet leaves. Beneath the stones. And then... one rainy night, they just dig their way out."
She took a half-step back, sat down on the edge of the twin bed, and smoothed the faded quilt over her lap.
"Goodnight, big sister," she whispered, her voice once again assuming that meek, childlike tremor. "Sleep tight."
I stood there for three long seconds, watching her sit under the yellow lamp like a living specter.
Then I turned on my heel and walked out, closing the door behind me.
I walked down the dark corridor, entered my own immaculately kept bedroom, and locked the door with a quiet, decisive twist of the brass deadbolt.
I didn't turn on the light.
I walked straight to the window that looked out over the backyard, past the overgrown garden, past the black silhouettes of the pines, toward the jagged ridge where the Blackwood Ravine cut deep into the earth.
Two miles north, hidden beneath the collapsed stone foundation of the old municipal reservoir, buried beneath six feet of clay, slate, and tangled cedar roots, lay the rotting pine chest I had dragged through the mud ten years ago.
Inside that chest lay the crushed, shattered skull of the real Daisy Vance.
I knew this because I was the one who swung the iron tire iron. I was the one who wiped the blood from her face. I was the one who buried her with my own blistered, bleeding hands, watching the cold autumn rain turn the clay into an unyielding grave.
Daisy had died that night. She was still there, decomposing into dust, exactly where I had left her.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window pane, staring out into the pitch-black woods, my jaw clenched until my teeth ached.
The girl in the bedroom was not a ghost. She was flesh, blood, and a terrifyingly precise weapon aimed directly at my throat. Someone had studied Daisy. Someone knew things they shouldn't know. Someone had constructed an elaborate, monstrous trap to tear down the life I had killed to protect.
*You want to play the martyr, little girl?* I thought, my eyes narrowing into the darkness. *You want to pretend to be a corpse walking among the living?*
I drew a slow, steady breath, feeling the cold, familiar resolve settle deep into my bones.
*I killed the real Daisy Vance ten years ago to survive. I will have no problem burying you.*
The sun rose that morning with an offensive, golden clarity, cutting through the thin lace curtains of the breakfast nook and illuminating a household reborn into madness.
I stood at the vintage cast-iron stove, flipping blueberry pancakes with mechanical precision. The butter sizzled in the skillet, filling the kitchen with an aroma so aggressively domestic it made my stomach churn.
At the cherry-wood dining table, my parents sat closer together than they had in ten years. Eleanor had applied lipstick for the first time since her last nervous breakdown; Arthur had abandoned his cane entirely, resting both elbows on the floral placemat as he stared across at the girl.
She sat in Daisy’s old chair, wearing one of Daisy’s oversized cable-knit sweaters—a faded heather-gray wool that Eleanor had kept sealed in cedar shavings.
"More maple syrup, sweetheart?" Eleanor asked, her hand hovering over the ceramic pitcher, her voice trembling with an eager, pleading tenderness.
"Just a drop, Mom," the girl said. "You know how I get with too much sugar."
She took the small silver butter knife and went to work on her plate.
I didn't turn around, but I watched her reflection in the dark, reflective glass of the microwave door.
She did not cut her pancake into triangles like I did. She didn't slice it into wedges. She methodically used the edge of her fork to carve out the exact center—the soft, underdone core—leaving the crisp browned perimeter behind on the porcelain.
Then she reached for her mug of Earl Grey tea.
She lifted the brass teaspoon. She stirred three times, counter-clockwise, tapping the metal rim once on the north rim of the mug, once on the south rim.
My knuckles whitened against the spatula handle.
Daisy had done that. It had been an obsessive, nonsensical quirk born out of a middle school phase she had never outgrown. Three turns left, tap north, tap south. A secret ritual she claimed kept the bad dreams away.
*How does she know that?*
My breath caught in my throat. I turned from the stove, carrying a warm platter piled high with fresh pancakes, my face rearranging itself into the serene, doting smile of Saint Clara.
"Here we are," I said, setting the platter down in the center of the table. "Eat up, everyone. We have to make up for lost time."
"Clara’s right," Arthur said, his eyes misting over as he looked at the girl. "Ten years... God, look at you. You haven't changed a bit. Has she, Ellie?"
"She has Clara's cheekbones," Eleanor said softly, resting her wrinkled hand over the girl’s knuckles. "And her grandmother’s chin."
I pulled out the chair directly opposite the girl and sat down.
The morning light was harsh, unfiltered, streaming straight across her profile.
At a distance, the likeness was terrifying. It was the face of a twenty-five-year-old Daisy—the natural, aging progression of the girl who had vanished at fifteen. But sitting three feet away, under the cruel brilliance of the morning sun, my clinical, predatory eyes began to pick apart the seams of the mask.
