The Stone Girl by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER 35

The last time Evie set foot in Lulu’s Tribeca loft, the ruins of the Twin Towers were still smoldering. The World Trade Center had been rebuilt, but her life still felt on the verge of collapse.

Stepping out of the elevator with Lulu, Chloé trailing, Evie remembered herself at seventeen. Staring out the loft’s wall of arched windows, watching the smoke rise from the carnage of 9/11, Evie was so desperate and unsure of how to repair the damage that had been done to her, she flipped the same coin she used to charm Jimmy the crow to decide whether to run away to Paris. She could not recall whether it was heads she goes and tails she stays or the other way around, but she knew that if she had called it wrong that day, she never would have had a daughter to save or lose.

In a little less than three hours her unknown twin would ring the doorbell. Her fear of all that could go wrong was spiked with existential curiosity. In the womb, they had started as one—a single zygote that was split into two. What would happen when they tried to reunite?

Since October 2001, the 6,000-square-foot loft had changed more than Lulu. The white leather Italian sofas were gone; the look was Scandinavian now. A Basquiat skull presided over the living room, a Louise Bourgeois spider clung to the wall, and a curving staircase that appeared to float in midair now rose up through the roof to a glass and steel double-cube penthouse that boasted a shallow infinity pool.

The excitement of the trip to New York distracted Chloé from the fresh bruises that had sprouted like blue mold on her thighs overnight and a headache she hoped wasn’t a symptom of leukemic cells marching into her brain.

When she got to the loft she went up to the terrace, plopped in a poolside chair, and Instagrammed snaps to her friends in Paris—her in the copilot seat of the floatplane as they took off from the lake; a bird’s-eye view of the city skyline as they dropped out of the clouds to land in the East River; the chauffeured Mercedes that picked them up from the Marine Air Terminal; and now last but not least a selfie of her wearing Lulu’s sunglasses posed next to the pool with the city at her feet.

Chloé knew her mother had brought her along to meet Clare Loughton to play on her twin’s sympathies, to make it harder for the woman to say “No.” The idea that she was auditioning for her life, that some rich woman who was coming to tea at five would decide whether she had a future on the planet, seemed both absurd and unfair. She went back downstairs where Evie was in the midst of rehearsing with Lulu what she planned to say to her twin.

When Chloé heard her mother say, “I can’t save my daughter’s life, but you can,” she interrupted, “Maybe we should get a wheelchair for me to sit in so she gets it that I’m dying.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.