“No!” I cried. That was two hours past when the movie ended.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be fine,” he said. “I have an easy day tomorrow. Just think about French toast.” He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. “I can’t believe we really made it happen,” he said.
I wanted to pass out, but I couldn’t close my eyes or slow my heart from pound
ing. He drew closer to me and kissed my cheek.
“I’ll go slowly,” he said. “I promise. It’s when you rush things in this world that you make mistakes, even in love.” He leaned back on his pillow. “Good night again,” he said. “Don’t worry now. I’m here. Nothing will ever harm you.”
The cat was on the bed again. It settled in between us and almost immediately began purring.
“Hear him? Mr. Moccasin is here with us. All the world is good.”
I lay there with my eyes open, listening, praying for the sound of the police pounding on his front door. To keep myself from screaming, I imagined Haylee crying and saying she was sorry she had started all this and how it was all her fault.
It’s all right, Haylee, I thought, confident that she heard me, that our telepathy was working and that it would bring her to me. We’d hug and kiss and vow never to be cross with each other ever again. I forgive you, Haylee. Oh, how happy she would be, almost as happy as I was. I would even help her with Mother. She didn’t mean to cause all this turmoil, Mother, I would tell her. She was experimenting, but she’s sorry. Please don’t be angry at her, because you will be angry at me, too, for not warning you. You remember? Everything one of us does the other does, too. Every pain I feel, Haylee feels, and vice versa. We would both be crying by now. Mother would be shaking her head, and then she would hug us both to her just the way she used to hug us, and all would be forgiven.
My vision of this was so vivid I could feel myself smiling and my body calming. I could feel myself rising off the bed and floating safely above all this. It was only a matter of time.
Just a little longer, and the darkness would be peeled away to reveal smiling, grateful faces. We would all be safe again, wouldn’t we? I was convincing myself of this when something occurred to me. It rang like an alarm in my head. Haylee had told me that his name was Anthony Cooper, but he had said his family name was Cabot. Did she just say any name that came into her head to get me to go, or did he tell her the wrong name deliberately? Why would he tell her the wrong name if he thought she really wanted to be with him?
It didn’t matter, I told myself, and relaxed again. He had been on the Internet with her. She would only have to show the police, and they would track him. They could do that. If they could find hackers, they could find him. Haylee would give them all that was needed. She couldn’t do it fast enough. She was actually just as frightened at this moment as I was. Almost all our lives, we were happy together and sad together at the same time. We shared everything. This would be no different.
In fact, I thought I could hear her whispering now, just the way she and I used to whisper when we were little girls, sharing a room and a bed, and Mother had turned off the lights after saying good night. It was so important that we comforted each other, especially when we were in the darkness.
“Kaylee-Haylee,” my sister would say.
“Haylee-Kaylee,” I would reply.
And we would both fearlessly embrace sleep at almost the exact same moment and see each other in our dreams.
Now turn the page for a sneak peek at
Book Two in the Mirror Sisters series
By V.C. Andrews®
Available Spring 2017 from Pocket Books
Prologue
My mother’s dinner date, Simon Adams, stepped out of his car right after Mother started screaming at me. She had practically leaped out of his car before he came to a stop when she saw me standing there alone. I had waited as long as I could to walk out so that I would be one of the last to leave the theater. No matter what my twin sister, Kaylee, thought or what anyone else might think, I couldn’t be exactly sure what would happen after she had left to, as she believed, meet my Internet lover and make my excuses. I had a pretty good idea, though. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have sent her.
The movie theater we had gone to as part of my plan was one of the few that weren’t in a mall these days. Most of the stores on the street in this neighborhood were already closed by the time the movie ended. People scattered quickly to their cars in the nearby parking lot or on the street, as if they were worried that it was a dangerous area. Maybe it was. I had no idea what it was like. We had never gone to a movie or shopped here.
“What are you saying? What are you saying?” Mother shouted after I began to explain Kaylee’s absence. “What do you mean, she’s not back? Back from where?”
I started to cry, always a good touch. Mother hated to see either of us cry, always expecting that the other twin would soon start, too.
“Where is she?” she demanded, stamping her foot.
“I don’t know,” I said. I kept my head down.
Only hours ago, Mother had seen Kaylee and me go into this movie theater, and now, when they drove up, she saw only me come out and stand there looking frantically in both directions. I was sure that my face was full of enough concern and panic to impress her. I had planned how I should look and sound. When you think ahead to what a scene will be like, it’s like rehearsing for a play. Mother wasn’t doing or saying anything I hadn’t expected when she heard what I had said. I could have written her dialogue, too.
I glanced behind me and saw the cashier, a woman in her sixties, and an usher who was no more than twenty, gaping at us. We were probably better drama than the movie now playing. Some other people walking near the theater paused on the sidewalk to look our way.
“How could you not know where your sister is? Maybe she’s still in the theater. Is she in the bathroom?”