Chapter 1 — They Fell Down the Stairs

My mother stood in the fluorescent light of the emergency room and told the staff, calmly, that my twin sister and I had fallen down the stairs.

I was seventeen.

I could barely keep my eyes open, and every shallow breath hurt.

On the stretcher beside mine, Nora lay still, and our stepfather, Roland Deming, stood at the steel sink washing his hands as though he had just finished some ordinary household chore.

I am not going to describe, in this account, what he had done to put us there.

I lived through it once, and my sister lived through it, and that is enough; the details belong to us, and reproducing them would serve no one but the kind of curiosity that treats a child’s suffering as entertainment.

It is enough to say that we had been hurt, badly and deliberately, over a long time, and that on this particular night it had been bad enough to bring us, at last, into a hospital where someone outside our house would finally see.

The attending physician was a woman named Dr.

Ingrid Sato.

She examined the marks on my arms, and then turned to examine the near-identical marks on Nora’s, and I watched her face change — watched the routine efficiency of a busy ER doctor vanish and something colder and sharper take its place.

She had seen, in about four seconds, the thing our whole household had been built to keep hidden.

And she was the first adult, in three years, who did not look away.

Chapter 2 — The Door She Locked

“Did they both fall down the stairs,” Dr.

Sato asked, in a voice that had gone very quiet, “in the exact same pattern?”

My mother, Meredith, clutched her handbag to her chest, her knuckles white.

“They’re identical twins, Doctor.