I won’t.”
I grabbed my keys.
Clara and I had been twenty when her car went off a dark highway and down an embankment.
The vehicle burned before rescuers reached it.
Authorities told us there was almost nothing left to recover.
We buried a closed casket.
For years afterward, my mother brought flowers to Clara’s grave. My father avoided the highway where the crash happened. I went through therapy, moved near my parents, built a career, bought a little house, and slowly learned how to live without the person who had shared nearly every part of my childhood.
Even ten years later, I occasionally bought two pastries without thinking.
I still owned two matching blue coffee mugs.
One was supposedly a spare.
Deep down, I knew better.
When I reached the dentist’s office, a woman sitting in the corner stood.
I stopped walking.
She looked older.
Of course she did.
So did I.
Her hair was shorter, and a pale scar ran along her jaw.
But she was twisting a silver ring around her finger exactly the way Clara used to twist bracelets whenever she was nervous.
“Hi,” she whispered.
