Chapter 23

23

Brant looks around our house, astonished. He admires our seventy-two-inch television, runs his fingers along our antique armoire, and then sinks into the cushions of our Italian leather sofa with a groan of ecstasy.

"Wow," he finally says. "My brother did really well for himself." But he is looking directly at me when he says those words.

I clear my throat. "Let me put on a little music."

I tell Alexa to play Nickelback radio. As the tune of "Rockstar" fills the room, a smile spreads across Brant's handsome features. I hover over the sofa, uncertain how to approach this fairly unique situation. I mean, this man is the identical twin of the husband I murdered, and I didn't know he existed until five minutes ago. This can't happen to people very often.

"Can I get you something?" I ask. "Some tea?"

"I hate tea."

I gasp. "Oh my God, I hate tea too! I just… I only offered it to you because I thought…"

"It's okay," Brant says. "I understand. It's the same nightmare that I have lived."

I sink onto the sofa beside him, clasping my hands in my lap. "I don't know why, but I feel this strange connection to you."

"Because I look like Grant."

"No," I say firmly. "It's more than that. I never felt this way about Grant. I loved him, of course, but…"

"No, I understand." He furrows his brow. "That's how I felt about Marnie. I loved her, but there was always something missing. But now that I've met you… It feels like we are two sides of the same coin."

I lean forward eagerly. "Tell me what else you hate."

"I hate so many things," he muses. "I don't know where to begin. I… I hate any book that won the Pulitzer Prize. I hate people who use Android phones. I hate dark chocolate. I hate tomatoes when they're raw, but I love them when they're cooked. I hate when a mystery book ends on a cliffhanger and you're forced to read the second one just to find out who did it. I hate pennies."

I get this dizzy, giddy feeling. I hate all the same things that Brant hates. Especially pennies. I don't understand why we even still have them. They got rid of the halfpenny centuries ago.

"Also," he adds, "I hate that the United States is the only country that hasn't switched to the metric system. It makes me so mad!"

"The metric system is clearly the best unit of measurement," I say. "It makes so much more sense for everything to rely on multiples of ten. Like, twelve inches in a foot? What is that ? And it doesn't in any way relate to 5,280 feet in a mile, which isn't even a multiple of twelve! Our current system is basically a conglomeration of incoherent measurement systems."

"I feel the exact same way," he whispers.

I never dreamed I would find my other half, but everything Brant is saying resonates with me so deeply. I didn't have these feelings even when Grant and I were still happy together. He didn't even care about the metric system. Brant is so very different from my husband, even beyond the tiny mole near his right ear.

Yet my feelings are so inappropriate. I can't fall for Brant. What would people think? And what about Marnie and all their many, many children?

"Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?" I blurt out.

"Yes," he replies instantly.

For the first time in a very long time, I feel a surge of happiness. The two of us exchange dopey-eyed smiles, and I can tell he's looking forward to this as much as I am. I don't know if there's any chance for a future between me and Brant, but I at least want to get to know him better.

"I have a few things I need to take care of," he tells me. "How about if I pick up some dinner, and I'll meet you back here at eight o'clock?"

"Sure," I say. "Um, what are you thinking for dinner?"

"How about McDonald's?"

I gasp again. "You read my mind."

Grant only liked the fancy things in life. He would never have gotten a meal from a fast-food restaurant. Any life I would have with Brant would be very different from the one I had with my husband. And that is not a bad thing.

I escort Brant to my front door. He smiles at me one last time, and even though he's identical in appearance to my husband, at that moment, he somehow seems handsomer than Grant used to be. He lingers at the door, not leaving my home just yet. He stands there, his gaze fixed on mine.

"Alice," he says.

"Brant," I say.

And then before I know what's even happening, he leans in and presses his lips against mine. He kisses me in a way that Grant had not kissed me for a very long time. He kisses me until my legs go weak, and he has to hold me to keep me from sinking to my knees. It reminds me of that first kiss with Grant outside the French restaurant, where all the molecules of my body were exploding at once. I missed that feeling.

When he finally pulls away, we are both gasping for air. "I'll see you at eight," he promises.

I watch Brant disappear down the walkway to my home. Presumably, he's going to drive away in that green sedan, the same one he was following me in earlier.

Brant was the one following me. He said he was doing it because he was looking out for me, but when I think about it now, that explanation doesn't quite gel. If he wanted to look out for me, why wouldn't he have simply come to my front door and introduced himself?

Yet my gut is telling me that I can trust Brant Lockwood.

Since I'm not going over to Marnie's house right now, I rescue the casseroles from my car and return them to my overstuffed fridge. The casseroles get me thinking about Poppy and how worried she's been about me the last couple of days, so I decide to head over to her house to spill the beans about what just happened. Poppy is my best friend, and she has a great way of looking at things. I'll tell her everything that Brant said to me—her reaction will tell me if she thinks I can trust him.

Poppy has been my next-door neighbor for the last five years. She lives in a colonial-style house just to the right of my property. Unlike my sprawling new home, hers is simple and rectangular and symmetric with a steep side-gable roof. Usually, she comes to my house rather than vice versa. As I am stepping through her walkway, which is slightly overgrown with weeds from her garden, it occurs to me that I have not been to her house in quite a while.

The front door of Poppy's home is right in the center of the property, with a number of small multipaneled windows surrounding it. I press my finger against the doorbell, waiting for my friend to let me in.

It takes several seconds. Finally, I hear shuffling behind the door. But when it swings open, Poppy is not the one standing before me. It's an elderly woman with snow-white hair pulled into a bun behind her head. She is stooped over, with a cane in her gnarled hand.

She looks up at me with a questioning expression on her face. "Can I help you, dear?"

"Oh," I say. "I was just… Is Poppy home?"

"Poppy?"

"Poppy Durden," I say. "She lives here."

The elderly woman frowns up at me, and the next words out of her mouth chill me to the bone. "Nobody by that name lives here."