The bell above the door chimed. I wiped flour off my apron and looked up, offering my standard customer-service smile. But the greeting died in my throat. The woman staring back at me across the pastry case was like looking into a mirror. She had my sharp cheekbones, my dark, unruly hair, and even the same nervous habit of chewing on her bottom lip.
“Can I help you?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
She gripped the edge of the counter, her eyes wide and shining with unshed tears. “I didn’t come for the sourdough, Penelope.”
Penelope.
I froze. A phantom ringing echoed in my ears. For the last ten years, I had been Harper. Sarah had told me I was Harper Evans, a fiercely independent only child who had tragically lost her parents years before the crash that took my memories.
“My name is Harper,” I managed to say, though my heart was hammering violently against my ribs.
The woman let out a broken, choked laugh and slid a faded photograph across the glass case. It was a picture of two teenage girls—identical twins—laughing on a sunlit porch.
“I’m Paige,” she whispered. “And you’re Penelope. Sarah didn’t find you wandering after the crash, Pen. She caused it.”
The walls of the bakery felt like they were instantly closing in, the sweet smell of vanilla and yeast turning cloying. Suddenly, every memory Sarah had so “patiently” fed me—the stories of my solitary childhood, my lack of extended family, the supposed reason we needed to move three states away immediately after my discharge from the hospital—took on a sinister, suffocating weight.
“She was our neighbor,” Paige continued, a tear finally escaping and tracking down her cheek. “She was dangerously obsessed with our family. When her car forced ours off the embankment, I was thrown clear. You were trapped in the wreckage. By the time I woke up in the ICU, the police said you and the driver of the other car had vanished.”
Paige reached out, her hand hovering over the glass. “She didn’t help you rebuild your life from scratch. She kidnapped you to be the family she always wanted.”
My phone buzzed in my apron pocket. It was a text from Sarah, who still lived back on the West Coast but never failed to check in every single day at noon.
Thinking of you, sweetie. Having a good morning?
I stared at the screen, a cold, heavy dread pooling in my stomach. For a decade, I had worshipped the woman who had guided me out of the dark void of my amnesia. I had sent her flowers on Mother’s Day; I had paid for her flights to come see my bakery. Now, I realized my entire existence was a carefully curated cage.
I looked back at Paige—at my sister—and slowly untied the strings of my apron.
“We need to go to the police,” I said, locking my phone. “Right now.”
