The Girl in the Mirror
Rose Carlyle
Prologue
For the first twelve days of our life, we were one person. Our father’s brains and our mother’s beauty swirled into one blessed embryo, the sole heir to the Carmichael fortune.
On the thirteenth day, we split. It was almost too late. One more day and the split would have been incomplete. Summer and I would have been conjoined twins, perhaps sharing major organs, facing a choice between a lifetime shackled together and a surgical separation that might have left us maimed.
As it was, our rupture was imperfect. We might look identical, more than most twins, but we’re mirror twins, mirror images of each other. The minute asymmetries in my sister’s face—her fuller right cheek, her higher right cheekbone—are reproduced in my face on the left side. Other people can’t see the difference, but when I look in the mirror, I don’t see myself. I see Summer.
When we were six years old, Dad took a sabbatical from Carmichael Brothers, and our family sailed up the east coast of Australia and into Southeast Asia. Our home town, Wakefield, is the last safe place to swim before you enter croc territory, so Summer and I and our younger brother, Ben, spent a lot of time on that cruise playing inside our yacht.
I loved everything about Bathsheba. She was a custom-built sloop, her sleek aluminum hull fitted out with the best timbers—teak decks, oak cabinetry—but what I loved most of all was the ingenious double mirror in the bathroom. The builder had set two mirrors into a corner at right angles, with such care that I could scarcely discern the line of intersection. When I looked squarely at either one of these mirrors, I saw Summer, as usual. But when I stared between them, past that line, into the corner, I saw a nonreversed image. I saw my true self.
“When I grow up, I’m going to have one of these mirrors in my house,” I told Summer, watching the solemn blond girl in the mirror mouth the words in time with my voice.
Summer put her little hand on my chest. “But, Iris, I thought you liked pretending to be the right—the other—way round,” she said.
“Mirrors don’t change what’s on the inside.” I pushed her hand away. “Besides, my heart is on the right side.”
We were the most extreme case of mirroring the doctors had ever seen. It wasn’t the facial differences, barely detectable without calipers. They had scanned my abdomen when I was a baby, and my liver, pancreas, spleen, all my organs, were on the wrong side of my body. This was how the doctors knew that we had split so late. When I lay still and watched my bare chest, it was the right-hand side that rose and fell in a rhythmic flutter, proof that my heart was misplaced.
Inside Summer, though, everything was as it should be. Summer was perfect.
Part I
Iris
1
The Mirror
I wake in my twin sister’s bed. My face is squashed between plump pillows covered in white cotton. It makes me feel like a kid again, swapping places with Summer, and yet everything has changed. We’re adults now, and this is Adam’s bed, too.
I roll over and survey the marital bedroom. Everything is oversize and lush; the colors are creamy and airy, but the carpet is the color of a ripe peach. There’s something illicit about lying here, even though Summer and Adam are thousands of miles away, not even in Australia anymore. Someone must have changed the sheets since they left, but I can smell Summer. She smells of innocent things: suntan lotion, apples, the beach.
This room breathes Summer, so it’s jarring to remember that she didn’t choose these furnishings. Adam owned this house when Summer married him, not long after his first wife, Helen, died. The room looks much the same as it did on Summer’s wedding day. It’s just like my sister to mold herself into the life that another woman left behind. She’s easygoing to a fault.
The super-king bed is nestled into a bay window with decadent views of Wakefield Beach. I struggle to sit up—this bed is too soft—and lean against the mahogany headboard, bathing my face in the light of the rising sun. The Coral Sea’s turquoise mingles with gold shards of reflected sunbeams. I wish I were in the water right now, swimming in those colors. There are a few things I need to wash off.
From here, perched on the cliff edge, in one direction I can see Wakefield River, north of the town, cutting through the land like a wound. Summer has always loved the river, although, as a breeding ground for saltwater crocs, it’s not swimmable. She likes to look at it from the safety of the bridge that our father built across it—his first construction project.
In the other direction, a faultless beach sweeps north to south, wild and open to ocean waves. Halfway along the beachfront, one mansion, faux Victorian with a hint of Byzantium, dwarfs the other beachfront dwellings. It’s the house we grew up in; at least, that was where we lived until Dad died.
My mother, Annabeth, must still be asleep in the spare room, so this is my chance to check out Summer’s loot. If I were house-sitting, I wouldn’t cram myself into the guest bedroom, but Annabeth revels in being unassuming. She tried to stop me sleeping here when I turned up late last night, but I couldn’t resist.
I claw my way out of the heaped bedding and rub my bare feet into the thick carpet. March is still high summer in Wakefield, and as I pad around the room, the warm air kisses my naked body. This time yesterday, I was in the mountains in New Zealand, where winter was already frosting the morning air.