Chapter 109 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

Chapter 109 CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE

 AVERY

Sleep wouldn’t come.
I tried everything short of knocking myself unconscious. Turned onto my left side. Then my right. Kicked the blanket off. Pulled it back up. Stared at the ceiling until the shadows on it started to look like accusations. Every time my eyes closed, Asher’s voice filled the dark like he had followed me home and taken a seat at the edge of the bed.
Do you plan on being your sister forever?
Or are you actually going to study something you want?
Are you going to be her forever?
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until colors burst behind them.
It was past two. The house was quiet in that deep, settled way that only happened after midnight… no television, no footsteps, no soft clatter from the kitchen. Jace had gone to bed hours ago. Ms. Rosa’s door was shut. Even the street outside seemed to be holding its breath.
And still, my mind would not stop.
I sat up.
The room felt too small. My skin felt too tight. I needed water. Or air. Or a version of my life that didn’t collapse every time someone asked a simple question about the future.
I moved through the hallway barefoot, and stepped into the kitchen. I filled a glass from the sink and drank without really tasting it, throat working around the knot that had been stuck there since the car ride.
When the glass was empty, I didn’t go back upstairs.
I slid down the cabinet until I was sitting on the floor with my back against the wood, knees drawn up, the dark kitchen stretched out around me like it had room for everything I was trying not to feel.
The weight of what Asher said was sitting on my chest.
Heavily.
I had tried not to think about it. On the walk from his car to the front door. While brushing my teeth. While checking on Jace one more time for no reason other than to prove to myself that something in my life was still simple and good. I had tried to fold the question up and shove it somewhere far enough away that it couldn’t reach me before morning.
It reached me anyway.
Because he wasn’t wrong to ask.
That was the part that hurt most.
For months, my entire existence had been organized around a single urgent task: become Emery well enough that no one looked too closely. Finish her senior year. Protect the version of her our parents still got to love. Keep Jace safe. Keep the truth buried. 
Survive.
I had been so focused on surviving the present that I hadn’t let myself look hard at what came after.
College applications under her name.
Recommendation letters describing a girl I was only borrowing.
A future mapped over someone else’s outline.
And beyond that?
Nothing.
A blank so complete it made my stomach turn.
What was I supposed to do now?
Confess?
The word alone made my pulse stumble.
Confess to who? My parents? Tell them that the daughter they were relieved to still have was the wrong one? That the night of the fire had sorted us in the most merciless way possible, and I had let the world believe a lie because I couldn’t bear the look on their faces if they knew the truth? That I had taken Emery’s seat, Emery’s name, Emery’s future, because the alternative was watching them grieve the daughter they wanted more?
They would hate me.
Maybe not all at once. Maybe not in clean, dramatic fashion. But something in them would turn. I had seen the shape of that turning already, even without the confession. The way their love for “Emery” came easier. The way distance had always found me more naturally than it found her. If they knew I was Avery…that I had lived and she had died because of a switch I begged for whatever fragile peace this house still held would shatter.
And Jace.
God.
Jace, who already slipped sometimes and called me by the wrong name without understanding why it made my blood run cold. Jace, who thought his world still had one big sister left in it, steady and permanent. What would the truth do to him? That the girl reading him dinosaur books and staying home from school after the hospital wasn’t the sister he thought had survived?
I pulled my knees closer to my chest.
Keep living as Emery, then.
Graduate as her.
Apply as her.
Walk into a college orientation under her name and keep going until the lie calcified into biography.
That should have felt like the safer option. It had felt like the only option for so long that I stopped calling it a choice.
But Asher’s question had dragged something ugly into the light.
If I kept going like this, there would be no clean moment where I got myself back. No ceremonial return to my own life. Just year after year of answering to a name that felt more like a memorial than an identity. Until even I forgot where Emery ended and I began.
Or worse…until I remembered too clearly, every single day.
My eyes burned.
“I don’t know what to do,” I whispered into the empty kitchen.
The only person who might have known how to carry something this heavy with me was the reason it existed in the first place.
Emery.
The missing of her hit so hard I had to press my forehead to my knees.
It wasn’t the loud kind of grief tonight. Not the fire and the smoke and the screaming kind. It was worse in its own way… quiet, detailed, intimate. I missed the sound of her brushing her teeth at the same time as me. I missed her stealing my hoodies and pretending she hadn’t. I missed the stupid arguments about whose turn it was to deal with dinner when our parents were gone again. I missed her foot nudging mine under the table when something felt unbearable and we didn’t want to say it out loud.
I missed being known.
Emery had known the worst parts of me and loved me anyway. She had known the soft ones too, the ones I didn’t show anyone else. With her gone, there was no one left on earth who remembered Avery Voss as a whole person rather than a shadow, a secret, or a problem.
And I had helped erase her.
That thought opened something raw in me.
Tears slipped out before I could stop them. I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep any sound from carrying down the hall toward Jace’s room, shoulders shaking as the kitchen floor stayed cold and unmoved beneath me. I cried for her. For me. For the sick overlapping space where those two griefs had become impossible to separate. I cried because Asher Whitlock, of all people, had looked at me in a car and asked the first future-tense question that actually belonged to me in months and I hadn’t had an answer.
What did I want?
Not as Emery.
Not as the surviving twin.
Not as the girl trying to bleed less noisily through someone else’s life.
What did I want?
I didn’t know.
Music, maybe. The version of it that used to feel like mine before guilt made every note complicated. A life in which my name didn’t feel like stolen clothing. A morning where I woke up and didn’t have to remember the list of things Emery would or wouldn’t say. The chance to be ordinary and selfish and unsure without those feelings threatening to collapse an entire carefully balanced lie.
But wanting any of that felt like betraying her all over again.
So I sat on the kitchen floor at nearly three in the morning, torn between a confession that would destroy the people I loved and a silence that was slowly destroying me, and cried until my head ached with it.
Eventually the tears slowed.
I wiped my face with the sleeve of my shirt, breathed through the leftover tremor in my chest, and stared at the dark shape of the refrigerator across the room. Somewhere above me, Jace slept in a bed I had checked twice. Somewhere across town, Asher probably slept without any idea that one conversation in his car had cracked something in me I couldn’t seal back up.
Or maybe he did know.
That possibility was almost worse.
I dragged myself to my feet, rinsed the glass, and set it in the sink with exaggerated care. My eyes felt swollen. My limbs felt hollow. Tomorrow I would have to put Emery’s face back on and go to school and answer to her name like this night hadn’t happened.
Tonight, though, in the quiet kitchen with salt still on my cheeks, I let one honest thought stand without forcing it away:
I couldn’t be her forever.
I just didn’t know how to stop.