Copyright 2026 by DJ Rawlings

CHAPTER TWO

The Empty Seat

Sarah was already at the café when I called from the airport. She told me to come after I had dropped off my bags, then asked whether Jake had enjoyed the trip. Her careful interest in the honeymoon made me more uneasy than her messages had.

Now, in the car, I kept turning the phone over in my lap.

“Call her again,” Jake said.

“She’ll tell me when I get there.”

“Then stop checking whether she’s told you.”

I put the phone in my purse. A streetlamp caught his profile as he changed lanes. He had slept on the flight, leaving a stubborn patch of hair sticking up near the crown. I had tried smoothing it at baggage claim. He had ducked away, objecting to being groomed in public, and I had been absurdly happy that I was the person entitled to try.

He glanced over. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Now you’re staring at me.”

“You preferred the phone?”

He reached across the console and held my hand until we turned into the garage.

At the apartment door, Jake dropped his suitcase handle. I had the key in the lock when he lifted me off my feet.

“Your back,” I protested, catching his shoulders. “You’ve been sitting on an airplane all day.”

“You could help by opening the door.”

I managed it. He carried me across the threshold and set me down beside the dining table, where a stack of wedding cards still waited to be answered. Two weeks ago, we had left in such a hurry that I had forgotten to empty the vase. Dead petals lay on the wood.

Jake kissed me, then reached past me to switch on a lamp. His books occupied the bottom shelf. His running shoes were under the chair. Most of the apartment was still mine, but I liked finding him in it.

“I should go,” I said.

“Yes.”

Neither of us moved toward the door. He kissed me again, less helpfully this time.

“Sarah will call,” I warned.

“She probably will.”

I took my keys before he could persuade me to stay.

* * *

The café windows had fogged against the cold. Sarah occupied a corner booth with two mugs of hot chocolate in front of her. She stood when she saw me and hugged me before I could remove my coat.

“You look annoyingly happy.”

“I was.”

She released me. “Sorry.”

I slid into the booth. “Tell me.”

“How was Costa Rica?”

“Sarah.”

“I do want to know.”

I gave her a few minutes: the rafting trip, Jake’s directions, the monkey that had stolen someone’s sunglasses. She laughed in the right places, but her hot chocolate remained untouched. When I ran out of things to say, she traced the handle of her mug with one finger.

“I remembered something at your wedding.”

I pushed my purse farther into the booth and leaned forward. Sarah had fragments of our childhood that I envied and sometimes doubted. She remembered our mother singing in the kitchen, a red sweater she hated, a place beneath a table where she liked to read. Occasionally a detail changed. She knew that happened and had grown cautious about telling me anything new.

“What do you remember?”

“We were having pictures taken. After the ceremony. The photographer kept telling everyone to move closer, and she was taking them so fast.” Sarah tapped her fingernail against the mug. “That clicking sound. I knew it.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know. But there was a boy. Sam, I think. He was arguing with someone.”

“An adult?”

“Another boy. Maybe.” She rubbed the place on the mug where she had been tapping. “I’ve gone over it so many times I’m not sure anymore. I remember feeling that they both belonged there. Wherever there was.”

I waited for more. She shook her head.

“That’s it. I’m sorry. I know how it sounds after making you come here.”

“You’ve been thinking about it for two weeks?”

“You were on your honeymoon.”

“You could have called.”

“And said what? I might have remembered our brother, but I couldn’t tell you where he was or what he was doing?” She finally lifted her mug. “I wanted you to have your trip.”

The drink had cooled enough that she set it down again without blowing on it. I reached across and touched her wrist.

“You should have told me it was bothering you.”

“It wasn’t just the memory.” Her eyes filled. “I kept thinking he should have been there.”

At the wedding. She meant Sam should have been at the wedding.

We had been told that three children survived the night our parents died. Sarah and I stayed together through foster care and adoption. Sam, my twin, was placed separately. By the time Sarah was old enough to search for him, his adoption was closed, his surname had changed, and the agency would tell her only that he had been placed out of state.

She had tried again after I turned eighteen. I signed the letters she put in front of me and asked about answers until the questions began to hurt her. Eventually I stopped asking. She had missed Sam for years. I knew I ought to miss him, but I could not even picture his face.

“Mom and Dad were there,” Sarah said. “I know how lucky we are to have them. I’m not saying they weren’t enough.”

“You don’t have to explain that.”

“I counted the chairs on our side of the aisle. Isn’t that ridiculous? As though I could work out where he would have sat.”

I remembered her straightening the ribbon on a chair before the ceremony. I had assumed she was keeping busy until it was time to begin.

“Maybe he doesn’t remember us,” I said.

“What if he does? What if he’s been looking too?”

A waiter stopped beside the booth. Sarah ordered fresh drinks, and I was grateful for the interruption. When he left, she watched me instead of her mug.

“You don’t want to find him.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You never say that.”

The words stung because I had let her make every effort while avoiding the question. I could not explain why finding my own twin frightened me. If he remembered the house, he might remember what happened inside it. He might tell me things I would never be able to stop imagining.

“I had the nightmare twice while we were away,” I said.

Sarah’s expression softened. “Did Jake know what to do?”

“He woke me. He stayed with me.”

“Was it the same?”

“There were sounds. Sharp cracks, one after another. I don’t remember them being so clear before.”

“Branches?”

“Possibly.” I took my hands off the table and put them in my lap. “I called Janie from the airport. I’m seeing her tomorrow.”

“Will you tell her what happened to me?”

“Yes.”

“And ask her about Sam?”

The waiter returned with our drinks. I waited until he had moved away before answering.

“I’ll ask.”

Sarah folded her hands around the new mug. “I don’t want to spend another twenty years knowing this little about our own family.”

“Neither do I.”

She searched my face. I let her. I had spent most of the evening trying to get back to Jake, but I could give her an honest answer before I left.

* * *

Jake had cleared the dead flowers by the time I returned. Two glasses of sparkling apple cider stood on the kitchen counter, and he had unpacked enough to leave his suitcase empty in the middle of the floor.

“Progress,” I said, stepping around it.

“I thought so.” He handed me a glass. “How is she?”

I told him about the photographer and the two boys, then about the empty chair Sarah had imagined. He listened, leaning against the counter, until I had finished.

“Do you think she remembered him?” he asked.

I set down the glass. “I don’t know what to think yet.”

He drew me against him. I stood there with my coat still on while he finished his cider over my shoulder. Eventually I took the glass away and put it beside mine.

“You can’t drink around me.”

“I’m learning.”

I stayed where I was until I could face taking off my coat and going to bed.

* * *

At 3:45 on Monday, my appointment reminder appeared over a reconciliation report. I dismissed it, found one more discrepancy, and reached for my calculator before I caught myself. I saved the file and shut down the computer.

Janie’s office occupied the same brownstone it had four years earlier. The waiting room still smelled faintly of sandalwood. Someone had replaced the worn armchair beside the window, but the little table with its uneven leg remained. When I rested my purse on it, the magazines slid toward me.

Janie came to the doorway. Her hair had turned almost completely silver.

“Come in, Stella.”

Her gaze caught on my ring as I passed her.

“Apparently,” I said, “you missed a few things.”

“Apparently.” She closed the door. “Tell me.”

I started with Jake. It was easier, and Janie let me enjoy telling her about him before asking why I had called. By then I had taken off my coat and stopped holding my purse against my knees.

“The nightmares haven’t gone away,” I said. “And Sarah thinks she remembered Sam.”

Janie listened while I described both. She asked what I could recall about the man in the fire. When I admitted that I could not hold his face still in my mind, she made a brief note and moved on to Sarah.

“Has she written down what she remembers?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ask her to do that. Just the details she has now. You can keep a separate record of the dream.”

“Separate?”

“You’ve been discussing them together. I’d like you both to be able to distinguish what you experienced from what you heard afterward.”

I turned my ring around my finger. “Do you think hers is real?”

“It could be. I can’t establish that from a description.”

“So we write it down and wait.”

“For what?”

“For something else to come back.”

“Is that what you want?”

I had expected advice. The question left me studying a loose thread on the sofa instead.

“Sarah wants to find Sam.”

“What do you want, Stella?”

“I’d like to know what my mother sounded like.” It came out before I could choose a safer answer. “Sarah remembers her singing. I don’t remember her saying my name.”

Janie put down her pen.

“But I don’t want to remember watching her die,” I said. “What if I can’t have one without the other?”

The office was quiet enough to hear someone climbing the stairs outside. I had come prepared to discuss symptoms and possible causes, as though my childhood were a problem at work that could be resolved by obtaining the missing figures.

“We don’t have to try to recover memories,” Janie said. “You can learn about her in other ways. Did anyone keep letters? Photographs? Home recordings?”

“Mom and Dad Jenson have one photograph of my biological parents. A few documents. That’s all they were given.”

“Who else might have something?”

“My uncle. He kept the house.”

“Sterling?”

I nodded. She remembered him, though there had never been much to tell. He appeared at graduations and weddings, spoke to us politely, and left before anyone could complain that he had not come. At my reception, he had kissed my cheek and said my father would have been proud. I had thanked him without asking how he knew.

“Have you asked him?” Janie said.

“No.”

“Would you want to?”

“I’ve never been back to the house.”

“You could start with a phone call.”

I imagined Sterling answering, then myself trying to explain why I wanted things I had managed without for twenty years. He had inherited the estate and most of my father’s business interests. Sarah and I had gone into foster care. Even now, I was more comfortable asking a stranger for help than asking him for something from my own childhood.

“Sarah will want to come.”

“Would that help?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell her. And tell Jake what you’re planning.” Janie picked up her appointment book. “I can see you again Thursday, if you’d like to talk before you make a visit.”

I accepted. At the door, I remembered the question I had meant to ask at the beginning.

“What if the photographs don’t mean anything to me?”

“You can still keep them.”

Outside, dry leaves scraped along the curb. I sat in my car with the keys in my hand until a driver waiting for the space gave up and moved on. Sterling’s number had been in my phone for years. I found it beneath the names of people I called regularly and rested my thumb over the screen.

Sarah answered my text almost immediately.

Yes. Ask him. I’ll go with you.

I called before I could put the phone away. On the third ring, my uncle answered.

“Stella?”