Page 39 of The Roommate Lie

When I finally leave the bathroom, Lydia is already asleep. Charlie’s guest room is quiet, but I know I won’t be able to fall asleep too. My stomach is in knots. The same feeling that’s made it impossible to finish a book since Christmas is never going to let me rest.

Tiptoeing downstairs, I slip outside for some fresh air. I can see Muriel’s bed-and-breakfast across the lawn, looming behind a cluster of juniper trees. Jason is over there with Tiffany somewhere, but that doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I always thought he’d be with me when my sister got her diagnosis, that he’d help me through it the way I helped him with his last year of grad school. But it’s probably better this way.

If there’s anything my ex could never handle, it was feelings. And I have a lot of them.

I call my mother instead, a woman who excels at feelings. She’ll know what to say, even if she’s still a little mad at me for keeping Nicki’s eye problems a secret.

“Hey, sweetie,” she says when she picks up. She doesn’t sound mad tonight, not even a little, and my soul exhales.

We talk about the diagnosis, and she promises Nicki is fine. But I can tell she’s worried about her too, that she’s worried about all of us. Stargardt disease is rare, but it’s genetic. If Nicki has it, there’s a one-in-four chance any of us kids could also have it. That it might show up slowly over time, the way it showed up for her.

We don’t talk about that, though, what might be waiting in my DNA. Not even if we’re both thinking about it.

“How’s Emma?” I ask. Because that’s a touchy subject I actually do want to talk about: my other sister, Nicki’s twin.

It’s not the twin part that makes this conversation difficult. Emma and Nicki aren’t identical. She has the same one-in-four chance of getting that eye condition as the rest of us. The situation with Emma is more complicated than that.

My mother hesitates. “She’s…working through some things.”

“Does she still hate me?”

“Hate is such a strong word.”

That means yes.

I guess I understand. I kept a secret from her about her twin for months. If Emma hadn’t figured it out on her own, staging an ambush that would’ve made our father proud, I was never going to tell her.

Nicki swore me to secrecy before she let me in her apartment on Christmas Eve. I promised I’d stay quiet before I even knew what was wrong, and she only agreed to stay with me in Texas if I kept my word. Lying to the rest of our family about her vision loss was a mistake—I knew that all along—I just wasn’t sure what else to do. Nicki was drowning, and I would’ve done anything to keep her afloat.

But none of that matters to Emma. A betrayal is a betrayal.

There isn’t much to say to my mother after that. It isn’t until we hang up that I realize she never asked how I was doing or how things were with Jason, but I don’t mind. What does that matter now?

I stand in Charlie’s yard a little while longer. There’s a hollow ache in my chest I don’t know what to do with, and I can’t bring myself to go inside. Then I hear a strange noise.

The faint hum of an exhaust fan rumbles in the distance. It’s coming from behind Charlie’s house, and I sneak closer. There’s a small white shed perched on the grass, right before his yard dips toward the creek that runs along the edge of his property. With my luck, it’s probably a murder shed.

I don’t have to move closer. But after my sister’s medical news, this is the perfect distraction…except for the part where I’m being stupid and dangerous late at night.Oh, well?—

It’s time to ignore my feelings and make Poor Choices instead.

Though it doesn’t look like much of a murder hut—that shed is actually pretty cute. Anxiety crackles in my chest anyway as I reach the door. My pulse thudding in my ears as I twist the knob.

It’s unlocked.

Chapter Twenty

ALICE

I open the door slowly. Inside, the shed is well lit, but it takes my eyes a second to adjust. For my brain to understand what I’m looking at.

Charlie is seated at a small workbench with a hooded exhaust fan overhead. He’s wearing what looks like sunglasses to protect his eyes, and the room is abnormally hot, his t-shirt sleeves pushed up over the muscular curve of his shoulders. The hard angles of his arms gleam under the shed lights, highlighting his tattoos.

In front of him, a boxy contraption emits a steady blue flame, like a short, table-mounted blowtorch. He’s using the flame to shape something out of glass. There’s a figure fixed to the end of a thin clear rod, and he twists it around in the fire to keep it warm while he works, sculpting it slowly, methodically. The figure is small, no bigger than a baby’s fist, and it isn’t until he holds it up to inspect it that I realize it’s a small glass raccoon.

He uses an array of metal tools on the table to shape it. Long thin tweezers, shears, and something else that looks like a tiny paddle or spatula. There are other tools around him too that Idon’t recognize, and I get lost watching Charlie work. Watching him create something out of nothing.

When I was a kid, I saw a glassblowing demonstration, but this is different. Glassblowing is big and expressive, physical. It’s like a dance. What Charlie’s doing is quieter and more focused. It feels like watching someone build a ship in a bottle, every movement small and precise.

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