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Maddison Ashby does not enter a scene. She arrives in one.

She’s through the door before it fully opens, both arms already reaching, her voice ahead of her body — “Margo,” — and then she’s there, and she’s me, and she’s nothing like me.

That’s the thing about having an identical twin. The face is the same. The hair is the same — she’s wearing hers down, big loose waves, where mine is in a ponytail — the height, the eyes, the exact slope of the nose my father gave us both. We came from the same cells. We developed the same features. And we are so fundamentally different that strangers figure it out within a minute of meeting us both, because whatever Margo Ashby is, Maddison is the version without the edit. The words she says are the first words she has. The expression on her face is whatever she’s feeling, arranged on a surface identical to mine, and the effect is disorienting every single time.

She wraps her arms around me. She’s warm. She smells like the same perfume she’s worn since we were sixteen. I raise my arms and I hold her, and I do not let my face do what it wants to do.

Brave face. That’s all. I have been putting on brave faces since the morning I found out, and I can put one on now.

“You’re here,” she says. Into my hair. Like she means it. Like this is simply her sister arriving and not the specific loaded thing it is. And maybe for her it is simple. Maybe she’s made it simple the way people do when they’ve decided to stop carrying something and handed the weight to someone else. I don’t know. We don’t have those conversations.

“I’m here,” I say. Light. Easy. The Charleston voice, the daughter voice, the one that’s been running since the Uber pulled up.

She pulls back. Her eyes are bright. She looks exactly like me when I’m happy. Which is to say she looks like someone who has good news she’s been saving. The good news is going to land in this family like a grenade. I know exactly what’s coming and when. I cannot stop any of it.

Then she sees Theo.

“Oh,” she says.

Not performance. Just Maddison, registering the very large man standing behind her sister with two bags and a face that reveals nothing.

“Maddison,” I say, with the careful brightness of a woman defusing something, “this is Theo.”

Maddison looks at Theo. She looks at me. She looks at our mother, who is still lit up like Christmas. She looks at Theo again.

“Theo,” she says, in the tone of a woman who has just understood a great deal.

Theo nods. “Hey.”

“He’s very tall,” Maddison says. To me. As though he cannot hear her. This is the thing about my sister — she doesn’t edit, and the not-editing is sometimes devastating and sometimes illuminating and always, always embarrassing. “Like. Very.”

“Yes,” I say. “He is.”

“Maddie,” my mother says, the mild correction she’s been giving my sister her entire life.

“What? He is.” She grins at Theo — my grin, brighter and less calibrated. “I’m Maddison. The better twin.”

“She’s not,” I say.

“I absolutely am,” Maddison says.

She loops her arm through mine, easy and warm, like we’re fifteen and nothing has happened between us. I let her pull me close. I keep my face arranged.

This is what we do. This is how we’ve been since the thing happened and nobody addressed it and we all agreed, without saying so, to keep the surfaces intact. I love her. I’m furious with her. She is my twin and I grew from the same cells and sometimes all of those things are true at the same time, with no resolution available and no procedure for the space between them.

Theo watches this. He’s reading the room — he’s always reading the room — and what he’s reading right now is the careful brightness of my face, the way I’ve gone half a register more polished since we got out of the Uber, the specific quality of the hug I gave my sister. He’s adding it up. He doesn’t know the shape of the wound yet. But he will. By the time this weekend is over, he will.

Something shifts behind the unreadable face. The ghost of the almost-smile — the one I’ve been collecting since October. He’s not performing comfort. He’s not telling me it’s okay. He’s just there, with our bags, meeting my hurricane of a sister, steady as he is at everything.

“Come inside,” I say. To all of them. To him. “We should come inside.”

My mother takes my hand as we walk through the door. Squeezes it once — the warm-and-certain squeeze, the one that means I see you and I’m glad. I let her. I don’t say anything. The house opens up around us. Somewhere inside it is a car key on a hook that belongs to a man I’m not ready to see.

One thing at a time.

Theo’s hand finds the small of my back again as we cross the threshold. Steady. Warm. Present. I let that be the thing I hold onto.

Just that. Just him.