Chapter 13 - The First Time I Met Lily In Person
We met six weeks after the greenhouse.
Neutral place.
A botanical garden in Massachusetts halfway between our homes.
I arrived early.
Of course I did.
Mom waited at a café nearby because Lily and I wanted the first twenty minutes alone.
Then I saw her walking down the path.
Photographs had not prepared me.
She moved like me.
Same slightly forward shoulders when nervous.
Same habit of touching our thumb to our index finger.
She stopped ten feet away.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Then we both laughed because apparently fifteen years of mystery ended with two teenagers saying hi like strangers assigned to a group project.
I held up a white lily.
She groaned.
“Seriously?”
“What?”
“My name is Lily. You brought a lily.”
“I’ve been growing them for you since I was six. I’m committed.”
She smiled.
Then hugged me.
That was the first time I touched my twin sister.
Nothing supernatural happened.
No instant recognition through blood.
No magical feeling of becoming complete.
Just a hug.
Warm.
Real.
A little awkward.
Better than magic.
Later she showed me the faint scar from heart surgery near her ribs.
I showed her the tiny NICU scar on my ankle from a line placement.
We compared childhood pictures.
Different houses.
Different Christmas trees.
Different parents behind us.
Same birthday cakes with September fifth written across them.
At one point Lily said:
“We didn’t lose fifteen years.”
I looked at her.
“We kind of did.”
“No. We didn’t have them together. That’s different.”
I thought about that for a long time.
She was right.
Calling the years lost implied they were empty.
They weren’t.
She had lived.
So had I.
May you like
The tragedy was not that nothing happened.
It was that we had been forbidden from knowing each other while it did.
