Chapter 1 — Show Everyone

My twin sister smiled as she reached for the belt of my robe in front of one hundred and eighty-seven guests.

“Come on, Kristen,” Jessica whispered, pitched just loud enough for the nearest tables to hear.

“Show everyone what you’ve been hiding.”

The ballroom of the Halston Country Club glittered with crystal chandeliers and champagne towers and a great many people who had spent the whole evening congratulating my parents on their perfect family.

I stood near the pool entrance in a white silk robe over my swimsuit, and I understood, watching my sister’s fingers close around the belt of it, what she intended to do, because Jessica had arranged this entire evening, and the humiliation was the point of it.

It was, technically, our thirtieth birthday.

But the party was for Jessica, the way everything was always for Jessica.

Her photographs covered the entrance.

Her accomplishments filled the slideshow.

Even the cake carried her initials.

I had been invited, as far as I could tell, because identical twins photograph better in pairs, and my parents liked a complete family portrait, provided the damaged half of it kept her robe on.

“Take it off,” Jessica said, and tugged.

What my sister did not know, as she smiled and reached for the thing I had kept covered for twelve years, was that she was not humiliating a helpless woman.

She was handing a fraud attorney a ballroom full of witnesses.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me tell it the way it happened.

I have decided to tell it at all — to set down the whole story, plainly, from that first tug on the belt of my robe — for one reason, and it is not the reason people assume.