My Twin Sister Tore My Robe Off in Front of Two Hundred Guests to Expose My Scars—She Had No Idea Who I’d Invited to Watch

PART 1

My sister smiled the moment her fingers found the belt of my robe.

“Come on, Emily,” Vanessa said, pitched just loud enough for the six nearest tables to hear. “Show everyone what you’ve been hiding.”

The ballroom at the Ashford Country Club glittered with rented chandeliers and a champagne tower three guests deep. One hundred and ninety people had spent the last two hours toasting my parents on raising, in my mother’s words, “two remarkable daughters.” The slideshow behind the head table told a different story. Every photo was Vanessa’s. Every award mentioned was Vanessa’s. Even the cake — white fondant, gold leaf, two names piped across the top in equal-sized letters — had been ordered, I would later learn, with only her initials on the receipt.

It was our thirtieth birthday. It had never once felt like mine.

I stood near the pool entrance in a white silk robe, my swimsuit underneath, because Vanessa had told the photographer she wanted “one candid shot of the twins by the water” before the toasts started. I hadn’t questioned it. Twelve years of practice had trained that particular instinct out of me.

Vanessa tugged the belt again, harder. “Take it off, Em.”

Somebody near the bar laughed the kind of laugh that comes out before a person has decided whether something is actually funny.

My mother, Diane, raised her champagne glass without looking directly at me. “Emily. Don’t make a scene.”

Four words. They had run my life for over a decade.

Don’t make a scene. Don’t embarrass your sister. Don’t bring up the hospital. Don’t ever, under any circumstances, tell anyone how you got those scars.

Vanessa tilted her head, and for a second she looked exactly like she had at seventeen, right before she used to call me Frankenstein in the school parking lot — always quiet enough that our parents could pretend they hadn’t heard. “What are you so afraid of?”

She knew precisely what. She had seen every inch of it.

Her fiancé, Ethan, stood at the edge of the pool deck with a drink in his hand, smiling like this was a game everyone had agreed to play. “We’re all family here.”

“No,” I said. “Most of these people are your coworkers and Vanessa’s sorority sisters. They’re strangers to me.”

“Then they definitely won’t care,” Vanessa said, and pulled.