Chapter Four: Vomiting Is a Valid Response

Rory I threw up in a dining hall bathroom because a boy said the word "twin," and if that's not the most pathetic sentence in the entire history of my investigation, I genuinely don't want to know what beats it. *S. Sterling.* Two of them. Two initials that were suddenly both S, both possible, both blown wide open again after three months of narrowing it down to one name I thought I finally had cornered like a very smug detective. I splashed water on my face and stared at myself in the mirror — buzzed hair, jaw set, a stranger wearing my face back at me — and gave myself the same pep talk I'd been running since the housing office. *You didn't come here to fall apart over a name. You came here to find out which one of them wrecked Kora's life, and now you've just been handed two chances to be right, which, statistically, is an upgrade, so pull it together.* It did not feel like an upgrade. It felt like the ground had doubled in size exactly when I thought I finally knew where I was standing on it. I texted Sam that night, because Sam was the only human on the planet who knew the whole truth — my actual, non-hockey, non-disguise best friend since middle school, currently three states away pretending to survive her own freshman year, and the one person I trusted enough to loop in before flying out here and becoming a completely different person with a completely different voice. **Me:** there are two of them. twins. i don't know which one anymore **Sam:** oh no. oh NO. Rory. **Sam:** please tell me you have not already developed a whole personality crush on one of them in under 48 hours **Me:** absolutely not. that would be insane. I have a PLAN **Sam:** you're typing like someone who just threw up in a bathroom **Me:** THAT IS NOT RELEVANT TO THE CASE She called me an unhinged menace, made me promise to check in nightly, and I promised, then lay awake until 2 a.m. doing math I did not want to do. If it was Jarvis — loud, easy, apparently the kind of person who gets handed a captaincy on charm alone — then I'd already spent an entire day laughing at his jokes like an i***t, and that thought curdled something in my chest I did not have room for right now. If it was the other one, Dray, a name I'd learned exactly six hours ago, then I had a whole new stranger to profile from scratch with less runway than I wanted before my cover started fraying at the edges. Either way, the job hadn't changed. Only the math had gotten meaner. Practice the next morning was worse, because now it wasn't just about not getting caught — it was about watching Jarvis run drills, laugh with his teammates, casually mention his brother twice more like it was nothing, and trying to determine, in real time, whether I was looking at a monster in a captain's jersey or just a guy who happened to share a surname with one. Genetics are not a crime. Genetics are, however, extremely suspicious right now. "You're quiet today, Rookie," Jarvis said, skating up beside me during a water break, nudging my shoulder with his stick like we were already the kind of friends who did that. "Yesterday you had jokes. Today you look like you're solving a murder." *Close enough,* I thought, and did not say. "Just tired," I said instead. "Coach ran us into the ground." "Coach hasn't even started yet. Wait till Thursday, you'll be begging for today back." He grinned, easy, unbothered, and the sheer, uncomplicated lack of guilt on his face made me angrier than it had any right to — because either he was innocent and I was wasting my suspicion on the wrong twin, or he was exactly the kind of guy who could smile like that with something ugly folded up underneath it, and I genuinely could not tell which version of him I was looking at yet. "You gonna tell me what's actually going on in that head of yours?" he asked, quieter, and for one unguarded second the charm dropped and something almost careful sat underneath it, like he actually wanted to know the answer. I almost told him. For one insane, exhausted, three-a.m.-brained second, I almost opened my mouth and said *someone in your family destroyed my sister and I don't know if it's you,* right there on the ice with a whistle about to blow. Instead I said, "Just focused. Trying not to get cut in week one." He studied me a beat too long — that same look from tryouts, like a math problem refusing to resolve — and then Coach's whistle sliced the moment clean in half and he skated off toward the drill line, calling instructions over his shoulder, back to being Captain Sterling, unreadable again, jersey and all. I told myself I'd gotten away with it. I told myself the hard part was just surviving one more practice. I did not know, catching my breath on the bench twenty minutes later, that across the rink, leaning against the wall near the exit with his arms crossed and a helmet under one arm, someone was watching me with an expression that had nothing to do with hockey whatsoever. I looked up mid-stretch and locked eyes with a boy who had Jarvis's exact face and none of his warmth — sharper, colder, unreadable in a completely different flavor of unreadable — and my stomach dropped straight through the ice like it had somewhere better to be. He didn't smile. He didn't wave. He watched me for three full seconds, head tilted slightly, like he was already three moves ahead of a conversation we hadn't had yet and didn't love where it was heading. Then he turned and walked out without a single word, and I sat frozen on that bench, heart going like a drumline, absolutely certain of exactly one thing. That was the other twin. And whatever had just happened in the way he looked at me, it was not the way strangers look at each other.