The Broken Ones

by Sarah A. Denzil

  I know from watching the house that there isn’t an alarm. There’s no dog. I have the key. I just need to be silent.

  I’m wearing all black, including a black balaclava. I’m a real criminal now.

  I slide the key into the lock and twist it slowly. The sound of the door opening is quieter than my hammering heart. I don’t quite close the door, because I know I’ll need to escape fast if anyone wakes up.

  My shoes are silent against the carpet. When my eyes have adjusted to the gloom, I scan the living room of the house I might have grown up in. What if Maureen hadn’t sold me and had gotten the money to move to Eddington some other way? This is the sofa I would have sat on to watch Molly Ringwald movies with my sister. That’s the kitchen I would have made grilled cheese in, or whatever they call it here. Maybe beans on toast, then.

  Maybe I would have been able to convince Mum to get us a dog. We could have played with him in the garden when we weren’t arguing about boys.

  There’s no other option than to shut down my thoughts. I have jobs to do. The most important is logging on to Sophie’s computer. I want to know everything I can about the two of them. But first, I have to install software to allow me to control her laptop from my own, which will be impossible if her laptop is password protected.

  I open the machine on the kitchen table and suppress the urge to let out a sigh of relief when it opens onto her desktop automatically. I quickly insert a USB stick and install the remote desktop software. There’s an agonising minute or two when I can do nothing but wait. Then I put the laptop back in position and slip the USB stick back into my pocket.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I imagine the two of them sleeping softly, with no idea that I’m in their house. Before I know it, my feet are moving up the stairs. A slight creak from the floorboards forces me to stop. Without breathing, I listen to the house. I hear it settle, but there’s no indication that either Sophie or Maureen has woken. I take the last few steps slowly.

  I have no idea who sleeps in which room. It’s by pure chance that I gently open the door closest to the stairs to find the woman who gave birth to me sleeping quietly on her side with her mouth slightly agape. There she is, the woman who held a baby girl in her arms and then five years later sold that child to corrupt men for them to do with her whatever they wanted. I could have been sold to a paedophile ring or worked as a sex slave for the rest of my life. I could have been murdered for pleasure and left in an unmarked grave. Would I have found more peace in that unmarked grave than in the life I have now?

  This woman robbed me of so many things, and there isn’t enough money in Daddy’s trust fund to make up for that. I reach towards her, stopping an inch from her face. A few minutes and I could take her last breath.

  Her eyes open.

  I retract my hand. I pull the ski mask from my face so she can see me.

  “Sophie?” she says.

  “You know what you should do?” I say. “You should drink bleach. An entire bottle. You should take all your pills at once. It would make you better.”

  “Okay,” she mumbles.

  I turn away and hurry out of the house, away from the family who abandoned me.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ADELINE

  A few days ago, I saw Sophie meet a man for coffee. It was exhilarating for me, because it was the first time I had seen Sophie with someone who wasn’t her mother or one of the teachers at school. Now able to access her laptop from my own in the B&B bedroom, I discovered that this man’s name was Peter and that he had been messaging her on her dating profile. Things seemed pretty serious, judging from his messages, though Sophie clearly wasn’t as interested as he was.

  I broke into the Howland house a few times after the first try. It was too easy—and it was addictive. Sophie, clearly a heavy sleeper, never woke while I crept up the stairs and whispered to our mother in the darkness.

  “I know you,” she said to me once.

  “You will know me,” I replied.

  Every morning, when I watch Sophie go to work, she appears even more exhausted than before. She’s had to take our mother to the hospital after Maureen drank the bleach, an event that made me excited and sick at the same time. She had to call the police and change the locks. That was disappointing. If I try to steal Maureen’s keys again, it might be noticed. My days of letting myself into the house at night are over. Especially after Sophie installs CCTV cameras.

  But then she does something even better. She’s installed hidden cameras in her own home that she can access on her computer. Which means I can access them too.

  I see everything. I see their daily lives. Every dull evening spent on the sofa in front of the TV. Every time Maureen throws a tantrum at her nurse. Every time Sophie pours herself a glass of wine and puts her head in her hands at the end of the day. I see it all.

  So I mess with them. I ruin Sophie’s relationship with the nurse. Why should she get to have best friends? I sleep with her boyfriend. He doesn’t even realise it isn’t her. He’s fat and unattractive, but I’m so turned on by the thought of being her that I don’t care. I find a bag of clothes meant for charity sitting on the front step. After stealing one or two items, I cut the rest into ribbons.

  I know where every camera is, inside and outside the house. I can turn some of them off via the software I installed on Sophie’s laptop. I do it just to freak her out. The thought of messing with her head, making her paranoid, becomes so exhilarating and addictive that I can’t stop.

  Whatever they do, I’m watching. When they get undressed at night, I’m watching. In those lonely moments of devastation, when nothing but alcohol-driven tears will do, I’m watching. They can’t escape me. I’m back, despite their best efforts to forget me, and I’ll make sure that they know me, once and for all.

  During this time of prying into their intimate moments, what I find the most interesting are Sophie’s emails to her ex-boyfriend, Jamie. It gives me an insight into a facet of Sophie and Maureen’s relationship that I didn’t know existed. It seems that Maureen didn’t just rob me of the childhood I deserved, she withheld that childhood from my sister. I can see it through every word in those emails. I see the complete and utter destruction of self-confidence in my sister. I see the toxic relationship that exists between her and our mother, and the way it breaks her relationship with Jamie.

  I go through all of her emails, creating screen shots and printing them out. I pin them to my hotel wall, highlighting important sections:

  I can’t do this anymore, Soph. I can’t watch her pick you apart bit by bit. I can’t have children with you because I don’t want her as their grandmother.

  You need to stand up to her or you’ll never be free.

  Put her in a home, Sophie. Sell the house. Move in with me and be happy.

  It’s so urgent and desperate. As a child, I watched Mom and Dad drunkenly tear chunks from one another. I saw them bruised black and blue from each other’s rage, but I never saw anything so sad as this long, tiresomely polite deconstruction of frustration. It almost breaks my heart.

  Almost.

  But Sophie was given a choice. She could have left our mother long ago and lived a life of freedom. I’m still the one who was sold, and she’s still the sister who stole my identity, leaving me with nothing.

  It’s not long after I’ve paid for my second month at the B&B that I decide that the time has come. The games are about to stop. I need to speak to my sister. I need to stop being her and face her.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  It has been her this entire time.

  The woman is mirror perfect.

  But I don’t see her. I see the girl I lost all those years ago. There she is, the girl who was born before me, but only by seconds. I see her as the five-year-old girl with freckles across her nose. I see the itchy jumper she used to wear in the winter and her wicked grin when we tricked our teachers. Her eyes are as sparkly as they ever were. Her face is mine, and
yet it not. It is the face I have wanted—needed—to see all these years. She’s the other half of me that I’ve walked this world without. There she is. My sister.

  Somehow it doesn’t matter that she has stalked and humiliated me, that she has reduced me to a quivering wreck: a woman standing over her own mother with a pillow, trying to decide whether I’d rather be a free murderer, or a trapped victim.

  She stands before me. She’s here. She’s going to show me what to do, like she did all those years ago.

  She lifts her chin. “Hello, Shadow.”

  “I always hated that name.” I swallow. “Sophie.” It feels so right to say that name at last. Now I know why I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin, why I’ve felt like an imposter my entire life. The reason is standing there in front of me, eclipsing me, turning me into a shadow. She was taken before I could find my way out of that shadow. I fell in behind my mother, and I never managed to claw my way out.

  “Hello, Mother.” Sophie’s tone of voice is ice-cold. Her eyes, identical to mine, narrow into two hard slits. Is that what I look like when I’m angry? Do I ever scrunch up my nose in that way? Are her facial tics my facial tics? We would have compared ourselves as we grew up. We would have stared into the mirror and giggled about how similar we were. Or how different.

  Immediately, I can understand how Mum could always tell us apart. Sophie stands in a way that makes people look up to her. I slouch into my knees so that everyone looks down at me.

  “Sophie. You’re… Is this real?” Mum’s voice is quiet, breathless. She can’t believe her own eyes. I’m not sure I can, either.

  I move away from Mum so that she can sit up. There are traces of tears on her cheeks. She reaches forward as though to touch her long-lost daughter.

  I watch as my sister’s expression morphs into a grimace. Her tensed shoulders almost fill the doorway. My eyes follow the long line of her arm to discover the knife in her hand. Of course. This woman stalked me. She broke into my house. She hacked my email account and cut my clothes into ribbons. It dawns on me that she probably slept with Peter. That’s why he turned up on the doorstep in such a disturbed state. She might even have killed our neighbour’s cat.

  I can’t trust her.

  Mum climbs unsteadily to her feet. “You’re here, and you’re real. I knew it. All these years, I knew it. And look at you. You’re as beautiful today as you were when I let you go. You’ve had a good life, haven’t you? They told me that the family was well off, that they’d provide for you better than I could.”

  The real Sophie lets out a derisive snort. “I’ve been provided for. Don’t worry about that.” Her voice is sarcastic. Mocking. I want to bite my lip and cower. Doesn’t she know Mum’s temper? Doesn’t she know her sharp tongue?

  Of course she doesn’t.

  “You went to the family they told me about. Thank God. When I never heard from them again, all kinds of thoughts ran through my mind.” Mum hurries towards Sophie, but my sister cringes away from her. “What did they call you?”

  Sophie recoils, shrinking back from the door. “Adeline.”

  Mum places a hand over her mouth. “Adeline. So pretty.”

  I can’t deny that it hurts me to see Mum treat this woman—who looks exactly like me—as anything other than the ugly, useless lump I’ve come to be. Why is Sophie… Adeline… so beautiful?

  Mum reaches out, and Adeline allows her to run her fingers through her hair. Tears run down her chin.

  “It was never supposed to be you,” Mum whispers.

  Adeline’s eyes find mine. “That’s not a nice thing to say to your daughter.”

  But Mum isn’t listening. She’s still touching Adeline’s hair.

  I lower myself onto the bed and place my head in my hands. It’s only when the weight of the bed shifts that I lift my eyes to see Adeline sitting next to me.

  “I wanted to be you,” she says. “I found out about you after my parents died. They left me some information in an envelope informing me about what happened. I read that note, and I needed to know more. I needed to see you. I hired an investigator and dug into your lives. That’s when I realised that you were living as Sophie. I thought you’d stolen my identity, the one that I should have had all those years ago.”

  “So, you stalked me?”

  She glances away and continues, ignoring my question. “It didn’t seem real. Part of me kept wondering whether it was all an elaborate hoax. But it made sense, because of who I am. The person I’ve grown up to be. Or not be.”

  She’s the only one who understands. I’ve never been whole, but neither has she. I’ve never been Sophie, and she has never been Adeline.

  “I never knew. The memories only started coming back to me recently, the first time I heard Mum say Shadow.” Saying it out loud sends a ripple down my spine. Is it excitement? Fear?

  “After my parents… the people who raised me… died, I started having dreams. Then pieces came back to me.” She smiles. It seems genuine, and yet it’s missing an essential humanlike quality. Warmth. “So, tell me. Have you felt like half a person, too?”

  “Yes.” The word is a breath.

  “All because of her.”

  We turn to Mum.

  It’s Adeline doing the talking now, taking the lead as she did before she was snatched. “Tell us, Mum. What kind of mother sells one of her twin daughters before trying every other possible way to find money? I’ve heard extraordinary stories about women fighting for their children’s survival. Mothers sacrifice themselves to shield their children from natural disasters, they prostitute themselves to earn money for their children, they fight in war-torn countries to get their children to a safer place. And yet your first thought was to sell one of us.”

  “It was never supposed to be you,” Mum says.

  This time, we don’t react to that horrendous statement. We let her talk. We both want answers. This is our story. We have waited thirty years to hear it. We have been denied what was ours all along, and everything that has happened to us has come to this. We wait, and we listen.

  “You were born first, Sophie. You were strong, healthy and beautiful. I gazed at your pink, round face, and for the first time in my life I felt what love is. Then I had to give birth to you, Becca.” She regards me. “And you weren’t easy. Not even from the beginning. You were born with the cord wrapped around your neck, and when the midwife tugged you out, you ruptured me. You wanted my blood right from the very beginning.

  “You bruised my nipples from breastfeeding. You were always hungrier than Sophie, always needy and whining. The constant crying drove me mad. I started taking all the stress out on Geoff. Becca, you were all him. You had his temperament. Sophie searched for solutions to problems. She’s a go-getter, someone who will always come out on top because life will never beat her down. You long for life to beat you down, Becca. You’re the victim and you always will be, because that’s the character you chose to play in life. I saw that when you were still in nappies. I knew it.

  “Geoff was weak and stupid, and he gave up on life.” She snarls when she says his name. “I married a man, but I buried a pathetic shell of a human being. He left me with nothing but debt. Gambling debt from a couple of loan sharks and a house I couldn’t afford. If either of you have ever known the weight of debt, you’ll know the kinds of decisions you have to make.

  “I had no one to turn to. Don’t look at me like that. Your father burned every bridge I had. My parents wouldn’t even talk to me after I married that ‘good-for-nothing’ as Dad called him. I went to them once. They blanked me. Wouldn’t even say hello. I had nothing, except for you both.”

  She folds her arms. “I made a bad decision.”

  Adeline entwines her fingers with mine. I flash back to that day in the park. The man who snatched her away from me looms over me. The strawberry lollipop hits the grass with a thud. My face is red and hot from screaming and flailing, reaching out and grabbing her hair. There was no one around who cared
enough to come running in answer to my screams.

  Maybe that’s why I have always wanted a child. That’s why I have ached for one, why I have felt as though I’d lost the child I’d never had. I went through the trauma of losing a child. I failed to protect my big sister, and she failed to protect me, too.

  I think about how I became so attached to little Chloe and her imaginary friend. She reminded me of myself when I was a little girl grieving for my dead sister while being forced to forget all about her. I wanted to protect Chloe because I failed to protect Sophie when the kidnappers came to take her away.

  “Becca, I can never forgive you,” Mum continues. “Because of you, I lost my Sophie.” She begins to cry. “But now I have her back. I can die, having seen her. When this disease takes me, I’ll know that I’ve seen you, Sophie, and that you’re safe.”

  When Adeline replies to this, her words are measured and calm, devoid of any emotion. A cold, creeping shiver worms its way up my spine. “You tried to sell one child and you ended up losing your favourite, so you forced the child you had left to be someone else and bullied her for years to come. You’ve never taken any responsibility for your actions, and you still blame Becca for what you did. I’ve met some despicable people. My parents weren’t just rich, they were criminals. Why else would they need to buy a child? But you—you are the first person I’ve ever met who is truly broken inside. You’re barely even a person. You’re a monster.”

  I watch as the blood drains from Mum’s face. She staggers back and slides slowly down the wall, ending up on her knees.

  “We should call the police,” I say.

  “No,” Adeline replies. “Not yet.” She turns to me, and I can’t help but gasp at the incredible likeness once again. “Becca, she was right about one thing. You do like to be a victim. You’ve stayed with this woman all your life, putting your own life on hold for someone who has so little love for you that she tried to sell you as a child. Where is your self-worth?”