We looked at each other then, Nora and I, the way we used to as small children hiding under a fort of blankets during thunderstorms — the look that needed no words, the one that had gotten us through everything.

We were identical on the outside, but we had never been the same person, and our difference was the reason we survived.

Nora was the visible heart of us: she felt everything openly, she wept when she needed to weep, she begged when she thought begging might help, and she carried, in her open grief, the emotional truth that I could not afford to show.

And I was the quiet vault: I felt everything too, but I locked it down, watched, remembered, calculated, kept the record that Nora was too busy surviving to keep.