examiner to arrive.
The boy’s uncle is sent back to the house with a female police officer in tow to break the news to the mother. Neighbors will go on to tell other neighbors about how she answers the door, arm outstretched, finger pointing at her brother-in-law’s broken face as she shouts “No, no, no, no, no,” over and over and over again, until the female police officer wraps her arms around the older woman’s shaking shoulders and draws her inside her own home.
Word spreads, text messages sent, phone calls answered, whispers met by gasps, grimaces of shock followed by the promise of tears.
Tyler Washington is dead they’re saying.
Murdered.
Found in the woods with his skull bashed in.
Less than a week later my twin brother is arrested.
My brother was born eleven minutes and 37 seconds after me. It was an easy delivery for twins apparently, or so our mom always told us. We were her second pregnancy, and we practically slipped right out; she and Dad barely making it to the hospital before I made my appearance. I came screaming into the world, face red and pink and white, covered in blood and placenta, all of it quickly wiped away to make me clean. Ethan slipped out silently though; maybe I was taking up all the oxygen in the room. In the womb. But Mom says the nurse just gave him a little slap on his small round bottom and he joined me in my new-to-the-world screams.
Twins.
Mom says she was terrified to begin with. Not just of how much more work and effort was involved but with how different we were from our sister Georgia. We took up twice the space, twice the time, twice the breast milk, twice the effort, but we were also strangely self-sufficient she’d tell us. She felt superfluous, she said. Our older sister Georgia had needed her, wanted her, all the time. We needed her occasionally, and wanted only each other. But that was a long time ago and by the time Ethan is arrested we barely speak to one another. Sometimes, I like to tell myself that it’s because we don’t need to; we already know what the other is thinking. But it’s not like that. We shared a womb, shared a life and then suddenly, we split. Into two different people and the difference was what we needed to make us two different people. Otherwise we’d have just spent the rest of our lives as ‘the twins’.
But instead what happened was that Ethan became my twin. I was Olivia, and Ethan was ‘Olivia’s twin’.
Until the Sunday when Tyler’s body is found.
Until the Friday, just under a week later when Ethan is arrested for Tyler Washington’s murder, and I become, forever, irrevocably, impossibly ‘Ethan Hall’s twin sister’.
“There’s no way she did it,” Matt said, “no fucking way.”
“Why?” I asked, “Because she’s a cute girl you wanna screw?”
Matt’s pale face pinkened ever so slightly, those promising rosy spots deepening on the apple of his cheeks. He avoided my gaze when he said, “No, man. She’s just so … small. And quiet. She’s not the type.”
“It’s never the type in these situations though, is it?” Daniel said, voice creamy and languorous, sliding his eyes towards me, glowing in the artificially lit room. It was dark outside already, the blank slate of a grey Oregon afternoon overcrowding the room, so we’d had to turn the ugly strip lights on even though it wasn’t yet four in the afternoon. We’d been in the same room for hours, lunch detritus littering the table, the air pungent with uneaten sandwiches and cold coffee. Tempers and nerves were starting to fray, impatience climbing the walls. I loved this part though; when it felt like anything could happen, like there was no way we could ever lose, like justice wasn’t a pendulum that could sway either way but a judge’s righteous gavel just waiting to be knocked on wood, the sound echoing around the room. We were doing background research on the firm’s newest client Reid Murphy, and the man she’d been accused of almost killing, James Asher, who was currently in a coma on an intensive care ward on the other side of the city. Murphy was 22 and looked even younger, so young you’d ask if her parents were home if she answered her own front door. And Matt was right; she was small and quiet, scared to death in my opinion, not that my opinion really mattered here. All of it would help though; the jury bench packed full of people like my colleagues who thought a girl like Reid Murphy couldn’t ever possibly hurt a man so badly she put him in a coma. But I’d seen something in the un-seeing stare of her eyes, the unwavering gaze, and I wasn’t so sure. Anyone’s capable of anything in my opinion. Again, not that it mattered, not that my opinion counted for anything; we were here to prove she was innocent whether she was or not.
We’d reached the ropiest part of the day, when we’d all been there too long: lunch had been eaten and we’d all start thinking about dinner soon, but for now it was the lull and the dip of late afternoon. Distraction roaring in, heads up, eyes darting between me and Matt, opinions readied to be lobbed across the conference room table. I looked across to Daniel, and could see that his eyes were dancing, like always, ready to tease and tickle, the facetious little quirk to his eyebrows getting more and more pronounced.
Daniel caught my eye and widened his, about to say something, mouth opening to a cartoonish ‘o’ when his phone began to vibrate and his forehead creased. He made the sign for ‘one moment’ at me, holding his finger in the air, and the groans began before he was even out the door. “You better be coming straight back, Koh!” Matt called after him, the glass door closing noiselessly on Daniel’s retreating back. “That better have been some medical results,” Matt continued to grumble, and I thought, not for the first time, about how quickly we’d all become exactly who and what the firm’s partners wanted us to become. Snipping and sniping and picking each other off, one by one. It was all happy and good natured until someone looked as though they weren’t pulling their weight, and suddenly the jabs had real force behind them and judgment started to crash the party. The best of friends, right up until we weren’t.
Daniel’s departure dampened the mood and a weight settled over the room. Instead of punchy and worked up, we fell into resigned lethargy, bending our heads down again, hard at work. Daniel was gone a while though, and my eyes had started to swim, desperate for more caffeine when he eventually came back. No one said anything to him when he did, but he was waiting for me when we finally left the conference room several hours later. He had been sat closest to the door and I furthest from it, so everyone filed out ahead of me, Daniel leaning against the hallway wall, waiting. “What’s going on?” I asked, shouldering my bag, adjusting my jacket. He had a look on his face I couldn’t quite decipher, maybe it was anticipation.
“That phone call was from my friend Ray, you know, the one who works on that podcast?”
“The true crime podcast? Why, was he asking for your help?” We might have only been first year associates, but we were working for one of the biggest criminal defense law firms in Portland, so a true crime podcast producer coming to Daniel for his expertise or opinion wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibilities.
“No, he’s here in Portland, with the host, Kat.”
“Are they working on a Portland case?” I asked, interest creeping into my voice despite myself.
“Maybe, yeah. I told them about you. And Ethan. They’re thinking about doing his case.”
I couldn’t say anything for a second, my mouth suddenly dry. When I eventually managed to speak it came out as a croak, “What?”
“Yeah, I emailed him about it ages ago, but they were just wrapping up the last season and wanted to do a little research, look around a little before deciding on their next topic.” He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, his face lively, animated; eyebrows up by his hairline, mouth grinning and winning.
“Why did you email him in the first place, though? I didn’t ask