Page 22 of Mirror Image

“I don’t want to go home.”

“Then go back to school. Go to Disney World. I don’t care. Just—” Her eyes squeezed shut, jaw trembling. “Just go away. Jesus, I literally jumped out of a moving car to get away from you. I thought that was a pretty solid hint.”

“Yeah, about that.” I crossed my arms. “What were you thinking? You could’ve been killed.”

“Yeah,” she said, too lightly. “That was kind of the point.” The corner of her mouth lifted in something that attempted to be a smile but died immediately in pain. “God. Everything hurts.”

“Uh-huh, good. Maybe that’ll teach you not to swan dive onto asphalt. We’ve only just found each other, and you go and do something extreme like that? Why?”

Her good eye opened, raw and shining.

“Because I was okay,” she whispered. “Okay with being abandoned. Okay with being the girl nobody wanted. Bad foster home after bad foster home—I’d made my peace with being alone. And then you show up. You, with your perfect stupid life and your perfect stupid name, and suddenly I’m staring at . . . what could’ve been. If the universe hadn’t screwed me.”

“And that’s worth ending your life for?”

She turned her face away, but not fast enough to hide the tears. That alone cracked something open in me. I reached for her hand—her good one—and squeezed.

“What?” she sniffed. “What do you want from me?”

“I want to get to know you. I want you to be my sister. I want a life with you in it, Samantha Kay Kinski.” Then, more quietly: “Unless that’s not what you want. I can walk out that door. I can let you go, if that’s what you need.”

“No.” Her head jerked—immediately regretted. “Ow. But . . . no. I don’t want you to go.”

“Then stop trying to shove me out of the room.”

She let out a shaky breath. “Look at me. I’m not going anywhere like this. They’re talking about sending me to a rehab place until I can walk on my own. There goes my semester.”

“That’s not happening.”

She blinked. Confused. Suspicious.

“What’s not happening?”

“You’re not going to any facility. You’re moving in with us.”

“Us?” she echoed. “Who’s ‘us’?”

“Me. And my parents. Terry and Doug. We’ll take a semester off. We’ll go back together in January.”

“Oh God. No. No. I’ll lose my dorm, my scholarship—” She stopped when I held up my hand. “What? You already solved all that too?”

“I did. You can move into my apartment in January. It’s paid for. And scholarships can be paused for medical reasons. My dad knows the provost—he can make the calls.”

She gave a tiny, exhausted snort. “Must be nice, having a daddy hotline for life’s problems.”

“You can push me away all you want—I’m still not leaving.”

Her good eye studied me like I was an unsolvable riddle. “You’ve officially lost it.”

“Maybe a little.”

She sighed, eyelid fluttering. “I’m not imagining it. Your parents don’t . . . like me.”

“They don’t know you yet.”

“They will when I show up at their house missing half my limbs and wrecking their china.”

I couldn’t help a tiny laugh. “China’s overrated.”