Dinner preparations were a near disaster. In the kitchen, Janeal could barely hold on to her knife while she cut carrots and bell peppers. Her hands shook while Katie—I still must think of her as Katie—worked next to her, silent and focused.
Or silent and distracted. Three times, Katie lost the grip on the potatoes she peeled.
An image flashed through Janeal’s mind: herself, raising the quivering knife and plunging it into Katie’s back. She gasped at the vision as Katie turned to face her.
Katie hesitated as though to speak, then concentrated on her potatoes again. Janeal wondered what she suspected of their earlier discussion, if not the psychotic possibility that they were both standing in some soup kitchen staring at each other as if they stood before a mirror.
The more Janeal pondered the impossible, the more the kitchen closed in on her, oppressing her with other details. Katie had stood next to her in the doorway and looked Janeal in the eye—Katie had never been that tall and wouldn’t have grown two or three inches since her eighteenth birthday. Janeal, not wearing her usual high heels, hadn’t thought of that until now. At the time, they were both flat-footed in sandals and Keds. At first glance, Janeal had credited Katie’s slimmer frame to the frugal way of life at the house, or to the trauma. Janeal herself was thinner than she had been as a teen. She had attributed Katie’s lighter complexion to scars, to fifteen years of indoor living and perhaps a damaged immune system. It wasn’t a dramatic change of skin tone, but it was enough.
Enough to match Janeal’s biracial tan.
Had Robert noticed these changes? Did he suspect that Katie wasn’t Katie at all, but . . .
Janeal’s knife hovered over a pile of vegetables while she studied Katie. That ring kept glinting as if it were a crystal glass filled with wine and Janeal were an alcoholic in need of a drink.
Let’s just say, for the sake of letting this ridiculous idea run its course, that you and I are the same. Let’s just say that I am standing here looking at myself, talking to myself. What would it mean?
It would mean Janeal needed to check herself in to a wholly different kind of treatment center.
Robert came in then and went straight to Katie. He didn’t greet anyone else. Janeal turned away. What would happen if he got a good look at her?
Though Janeal’s goal had been to be completely unnoticed, she hadn’t anticipated the pain of coming close enough to touch him and having to keep her distance. She was not able to prevent herself from staring at him, staring and remembering.
He leaned in close to Katie’s ear. He touched the small of her back. Janeal chopped vegetables within tossing distance of those two and felt the blade of old emotions slice a jagged tear down the center of her sternum.
Robert belonged to her. Had belonged to her since they were twelve and fourteen and had hiked that red mesa together for the first time, hand in hand, while Katie straggled.
When had Katie caught up and separated them like a yolk from an egg white?
It had happened long before now, Janeal was forced to admit, long before the arrest of Sanso or the destruction of her father’s kumpanía. At the time, the reality of their separation had made it easier for Janeal to leave the way she did. Of course, she had thought Robert and Katie were dead.
Katie was dead, wasn’t she?
Janeal’s knife came down on her finger as if it were a stalk of celery, but she didn’t notice it until someone exclaimed and rushed over with a dish towel. Robert glanced at her then. I’m so sorry, Janeal sent out with her eyes while the person gripped her hand in the towel and forced Janeal to apply pressure, I thought you were dead.
There was no point in trying to justify that claim, though, because she knew she would have left him anyway. When she held his eyes too long, he looked away.
Another resident rushed over with a first-aid kit. Janeal wondered if the tables had been turned and Robert had discovered her first, would he have come to her side as quickly?
Yes. She liked to believe he would have.
Robert was the real reason her love for Milan Finch was no love at all. Because she had Robert to compare him to.
Was her plan to find out and bury whatever Katie might tell Robert about the money pointless or essential now? While her fellow cook examined the knife wound and declared it didn’t need stitches, Janeal toyed with the idea of telling Robert who she was. She could make him choose between Janeal and Katie. She could confront him with the truth that Katie was an imposter.
Katie and Robert talked in low tones near the stove, and Janeal decided she could not afford the risk of losing Robert again. She had lost Robert to Katie fifteen years ago, and he’d never return to her as long as Katie stood between them.