Suit, стр. 21

My own breath was heard throughout the quiet room as I looked around. Sleek prints decorated the walls. A black and white photo of the ocean and a long pier. Something shiny and silver hung with geometric lines and curves over a white-stoned fireplace. I looked at it with a peculiar stare and a frown. Wall art?

Look for a notebook. A journal or something. Gabby was always writing. I frowned at the premonition and looked around the room, like I wasn’t alone, pondering my third-person inner dialogue. What the hell? I walked around the room, paying little attention to the intuition. I wrote? Hhmph. I wasn’t really remembering anything. It was sort of like the dream. I knew I was a twin and now I knew I used to write. Two pieces to a thousand-word puzzle.

I hopped around the beautiful home, taking it all in, stopping at the two rooms, separated by a bathroom perfect for two little girls. A round tub in the middle of a pink-and-white room. Double sinks and matching vanities with their names. I hoped I designed that room. I loved it.

The cuteness overflowed into their bedrooms. One neat and tidy, filled with books and posters of dolphins. The other messy and plastered in Barbie everything. Rowan’s Barbie’s were lucky. Mine never even got a house or a pool. She got the back seat of a car or stuffed in the bottom of my back pack. Hmmm… Another piece to a puzzle that made no sense. I had a Barbie without a home, growing up. Why the hell couldn’t I remember something that mattered? Fuck Barbie and her house.

A motherly instinct moved me toward the dirty socks on the floor, but the pain in my lower back kept me from picking them up and I moved on. Next was an open room with windowed walls on both sides. Enough toys to open a toy-store took over the sunny room. My kids were spoiled rotten. Two of everything. You would have thought they were twins. The far side facing the ocean was lined with gym equipment. A treadmill, a spin cycle, a resistance band weight bench, and a chin-up bar. Adjustable, hanging on the wall. What a beautiful view to workout.

Separating the north and south side of the house was the open living and kitchen area. Another wall of glass opened to an outside kitchen leading to the pool and the backyard. The yard just before the ocean. I assumed the other side of the house was off limits. Four doors on that side opened. A beautiful bedroom decorated in black and silver. Chic and lustrous. Somebody had good taste. I smiled, hoping that someone was me. After opening the closet to nothing but a few blankets and pillows, I determined that it wasn’t Paxton’s room. Must be the guest room.

The room after that was locked, and the next was a nice-sized guest bath. Three bathrooms. Wow. The next door was locked, too, but the next one opened to a theater room. Four reclining theater seats, and one huge screen. Damn. We were all spoiled.

Next was the door off from the kitchen. The garage. The pearl-white Lexus parked where we had left it.

I was blessed with nice everything. A nice home. A nice car. Beautiful children. A pool right outside my room. The ocean, just a couple of hundred feet from there. And…

One fucked up marriage. I was a kept woman. Black and white. Red and Green. I was a glorified whore.

Chapter Six

I had my leg propped on the chair in front of me, the magnificent ocean as my view. I hadn’t even realized I had dozed off until I heard the girls inside.

“No, Rowan. I had it first. Tell her I had it first, Tricia,” Ophelia wailed in a loud, shrill voice. I yawned and sat up while catching my bearings.

“Noooo! Mom! Mom!” Rowan screamed in an even louder, high-pitched screech.

Wait. That’s me. I’m the mom. I stood to go help out with the argument when I heard another voice.

“Hey, guys. Come on. It’s a ruler. Can’t you find something better to fight over? One of you go see if your mom’s in her room.”

“I’m right here,” I announced from the glass door. I stared at the female stranger with absolutely no recollection at all. She was pretty. High maintenance for sure. She wore red stilettos with black shorts and a white cami. Her nails, hair, and makeup looked like she’d just stepped off the cover of Vogue.

“Oh, my God. Gabriella! You look like hell. Are you okay? I would have come and seen you, but Paxton said you didn’t want to see anyone. Do you really not remember? You don’t remember me?”

My eyebrows arched, waiting for her to finish.

“Mom, tell Ophelia I had it first.”

“I did have it first,” Ophelia whined with big tears swelling in her charcoal-gray eyes. My eyes. I smiled at my neighbor as I lifted a finger, requesting a hold please. Ophelia sat on the floor, hiding the plastic ruler behind her back, trying like hell to keep her sister from snatching it from her hands.

I sort of fell into the couch. I’d done okay until that last inch or so. The pain that shot down my leg did me in. “Can I please see the ruler?” I asked with an open hand. Ophelia sniffed and wiped tears down her face with her fingers, debating on whether or not this was a trick before handing it over.

“What do you want to use this for?” I questioned, sure that it was simply an argument over the object and not the purpose at all.

“It’s for to draw a line not crooked and measure stuff,” she explained in the cutest little voice ever. I sucked in on my bottom lip to keep from smiling as I felt my heart melt. Ophelia sat on her hands and rocked back and forth on her butt with big eyes and a pouty bottom lip.

“But what are you going to do with it?”

“I just. I just. I just gonna hold it in my hand,” she replied while struggling for the right answer. Weary across her face, she had the same two little lines on her forehead when she worried, just like Paxton.

“I want to draw a straight line,” Rowan said. Her counteroffer trumped Ophelia’s silly one, replacing it with her more logical answer.

“I’m drawing a straight line!” Ophelia screamed again, this time in a full-blown tantrum. Her body flopped to the floor like she was possessed. Demons taking over her little body.

I guess I sort of froze. I didn’t know what to do with her. What to say to calm the scream. My neighbor Tricia came to the rescue when all I did was watch, too terrified to move. She lifted Ophelia from the floor, plopping her to her bare feet with a thump. We exchanged a glance and she continued. I think she wanted to see if I was about to protest her correcting my child, or not. I didn’t.

“How about you go wash your hands for lunch. You have to tell your mom about your mask you made. Remember?”

“I-I-I-I made a mask. It gots a lot sprinkles and jewels.”

“Mine has a feather,” Rowan smartly said, daggers shooting through her little sister while they fought for the attention. Geesh.

Tricia kept them talking about their new creations, ushering them toward their bathroom to wash up for lunch.

“I ordered Chinese. It should be here any minute,” she said once she had the girls calmed down.

“Oh, okay.” Did I like Chinese? For some reason, I didn’t think I did.

“This is so weird. You really don’t know who I am, do you?”

I snorted with a heavy sigh, and then a smile. “Not a clue.”

Tricia sat on the sofa and shook her head with wide eyes when the girls started again from the bathroom. This time over the soap. “They both need naps. I can’t imagine what that is like. You don’t remember anything?”

“Nothing. I’ve had a couple of permissions, but they don’t make sense. Do you know if I had a sister?”

“I don’t think so. You’ve never mentioned any family at all. I asked you about your parents once, but you were very vague. You said you hadn’t seen your mother in over ten years. I didn’t know what that meant. You didn’t want to talk about it.”