Come As You Are

Naturally, that’s the cue for our next trick, something we did to our mom and our sister. We turn around, exchange eyeglasses, switch spots, do it again, then pivot once more to face Sabrina, playing our own game of three-card Monte. Two-Card twins.

She makes a stop sign with her hand. “Stop. It’s too freaky.”

“We freaked our Mom out all the time too,” Dylan says, laughing.

Sabrina peers studiously at my twin. Her lips curve up. She points to Dylan’s wedding band. “Another way I can tell you apart is the wedding band. I hope you don’t pull the twin switcheroo trick on your wife?”

He cracks up. “I would never do that to Evie. Plus, I feel like she could tell us apart because I’m ultimately more strapping and studly than my brother. I have more in certain areas.”

I scoff at my brother, clapping him on the back. “Oh, that’s a good one.”

“Wait.” Sabrina lowers her voice to a whisper. “Do identical twins have the same size . . .?”

I laugh. “Actually, I don’t know because we haven’t compared. Ever.”

Chuckling, she turns away from us briefly, perhaps to cover up that she’s laughing harder now. She tamps it down, clears her throat and taps her watch. “Love the party tricks, but can we chat now?”

The game starts in thirty minutes, so we sit with Sabrina on the metal bleachers, and she interviews us about starting and selling our first company, and what we learned. Sometimes, we finish each other’s sentences.

“What do you think makes Flynn a visionary?” she asks Dylan.

He tries to suppress a smile. “He has twenty—”

I jump in, shaking my head. “—eight thousand vision.”

“Just like—”

I point at Dylan. “—him.”

Sabrina’s lips twitch like she’s trying to rein in a grin.

When we’re done, Dylan says he needs to stretch before the game, so he heads to the field. She watches him then swings her gaze to me. “It’s funny to meet him after knowing you.”

I arch an eyebrow, curious. “How so?”

“This might sound weird, but you don’t seem like a twin when it’s just us chatting. But with him, you absolutely are.”

“Did you expect me to seem like a twin?”

“I think I did. Because it’s so much a part of your identity, or at least what’s been written about you. You’re always identified online as the Parker twins because of your first company, but when I’m with you, I don’t think of you that way.”

“How do you think of me?”

She nibbles on the corner of her lip, considering the question, it seems. “When it’s just you and me, I can see who you are shining through. You’re this fascinating, brilliant, thoughtful, creative man, and it’s hard for me to see how you ever shared credit with anyone.”

“Keep thinking of me that way. I did everything on my own. It was all me.” I wink.

“It’s more that you’re so uniquely you, from the pineapple to the poetry to the wordplay to your jokes. That’s you. Flynn Parker. Not Flynn the twin.” She holds her palms like scales, raising then lowering. “Then when I see you with your brother, you have this whole other twin-ness to you. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just different.”

“Would you be different if I met your brother?”

“We’re not twins. I’m five years older. He’s twenty-three.”

“Right, but you’re close, aren’t you?”

“Very much so. He’s amazing. He’s one of the reasons I wanted this opportunity so badly.”

“In what way?”

“I support my brother. I help pay his bills for school.”

“You do?”

She nods, a smile spreading instantly. “He’s going to divinity school, getting a master’s.”

I take a moment to absorb the enormity of what she does for him. It’s hard enough to pay bills on her own, but to help the person she adores? “That’s amazing. I’m floored. What an incredible thing to do.”

“I kind of raised him,” she says, a note of pride in her voice.

“You did?”

“We never knew our dad. He didn’t ever live with us. I suspect he knocked up our mom twice, and that was the extent of his role in her life. As for her, she started to check out when my brother was ten or eleven. I looked out for him after that.”

“How did she check out?”

She swallows and looks away. “She . . . well, let’s just say she doesn’t have the best track record with the law.”

My eyes widen. “What happened, may I ask?”

She counts off on her fingers. “Petty theft, shoplifting, then grand theft. She started by stealing small items from stores, then from rich neighborhoods—silver, china, expensive objects. Soon, she moved on to jewelry.”

She says it all so matter-of-factly, but as someone raised by a happily married couple in a crime-free family, it’s hard to imagine this upbringing as normal. But that’s what’s shocking to me—this is Sabrina’s normal. It’s also what she’s strived to separate herself from, I surmise.

“That must have been incredibly hard.”

“She’s been in and out of jail most of my adult life. If she’s not in jail, she’s asking me for money. She gambles a lot. She does what she wants, and she blasts into town asking for more. I do everything I can to avoid her, but she usually finds a way to show up when I least want her to.”

I drag a hand over my jaw. “Damn. That’s tough, but it’s amazing that you help your brother.”

The mention of her brother brings a radiance to her eyes. They sparkle when she talks about him. “She left for good when he was fifteen. He’s the reason I went to school in New York. I had a bunch of scholarships, but I needed to stay close and look after him. The only thing she left was the tiny condo she’d owned. I lived there with him when I was in college since he was still in high school. He was the most important thing to me—he still is—and he wound up doing a beautiful thing with his life.”

Her smile is so warm and earnest it reaches someplace far inside me, finding a home. It makes me care even more for her, when I’m already wading into the deep end, so deep that my don’t-get-involved-with-work-associates rule is close to breaking. “Kevin is my hero. He has the biggest heart, and the strongest sense of right and wrong.”

As she tells me about him, a stone of guilt digs against my ribs. Guilt for thinking she was after me for money. Guilt for wondering about her motives. She’s so genuinely focused on her brother, so giving of herself, and with the short straw she drew with her mom, I can’t see her in the same category as the women in my past.

“You’re good people,” I say, silently exonerating myself from doubting her a week ago. I don’t doubt her anymore. I know who she is.

She blushes. “Thanks. Speaking of good people and maybe not-so-good people, what do you think of Kermit La Franchi? He asked my best friend how the story was going. Isn’t that odd?”

I swallow hard, the pleasant balloon of our conversation now popped. “Sabrina, I think he knows about us.”

She cringes. “What?”

I tell her what happened in the hall after she hightailed it from the party, wishing I didn’t have to be the bearer of bad news. “He asked me for an interview too. I held him off, but he called Jennica and is trying to weasel his way in.”