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How this happened requires skipping ahead, I’m afraid. Don’t worry. You’ll get the full story about the murders soon. But for now, I must jump to six months after that night.
I’d been confined to my bed that whole time, unable to speak, incapable of moving anything but my left hand. Useless Dr. Walden had declared me brain dead, when the truth was my brain was one of the few things about me that actually worked. I knew from Archie, by my side more often than not, that my parents were dead and that my sister had them cremated the moment the law allowed it. I also knew that she was the one everyone blamed for their deaths, although there was scant evidence to prove it.
And I knew that my name had been changed.
Not legally, of course. That would have left a paper trail, whichis the last thing my sister wanted. This was a more informal change, slipped into my life as quickly as a knife to the ribs.
One day, she strode into my room without warning and said, “Your name is Lenora Hope. Mine is Mrs. Baker. Never forget that.”
At first, I was confused. Even though I was at my weakest and most addled, I knew I was Virginia. Yet my sister kept calling me Lenora, as if I’d been mistaken. As if all my life I’d been wrong about something so defining as my own name.
“How are you, Lenora?” she said every time she peeked into my room to check in on me.
At night, she told me, “Time for sleep, Lenora.”
At meals, she announced, “Time to eat, Lenora.”
One morning, I awoke to her sitting beside the bed, my hand in hers. She stroked the back of it gently, the way our mother had done. Without looking at me, she said, “I’m leaving for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Archie will take care of you until I return. Goodbye, Lenora.”
Then she was gone.
For years.
How many, I’m no longer sure. Time passes differently when you don’t speak, barely move, spend most of your time watching the seasons gradually change outside your window.
She returned as suddenly as she had departed. Marching into my room one day, she said, “I’m back, Lenora. Did you miss your beloved Mrs. Baker?”
Again, I was confused. The whole time she was away, Archie had called me Virginia. Yet here was my sister, back to addressing me as Lenora. It went on like this for months.
“How are you, Lenora?”
“Time for sleep, Lenora.”
“Time to eat, Lenora.”
I surrendered eventually. I had no choice.
I was Lenora.
The physician who replaced Dr. Walden called me that, as did every nurse I had. I got so used to it that sometimes even I forgot who I really was.
And what of the real Lenora?
She was fully Mrs. Baker, of course, taking the place of the real Miss Baker, who’d fled Hope’s End just before the murders. The only time she ever acknowledged what she’d done was one night a few months after her return. She crept into my room and gathered me into her arms. A sure sign she was drunk. My sister never touched me when she was sober.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to do it. I had to have a life of my own. Just for a little bit.”
Since then, it’s been a game of pretend. That I’m Lenora. That she’s Mrs. Baker. That we’re not sisters but just an incapacitated boss and her devoted servant. And it’s how things will remain until one of us Hope girls dies.
I know she thinks it’s me who will go first.
Now my only goal in a life that had once been filled with many dreams and desires is to make sure that doesn’t happen.
THIRTY-EIGHT
You must think me a terrible person,” Lenora says after detailing her life away from Hope’s End. Spending two years in France. Drinking in music halls. Mingling with artists. Kissing strangers on the streets of Paris. She met an American serviceman, fell in love, got engaged, was crushed when he died. All those photographs I found in her bedroom were snapshots of that other life.
The one Virginia had dreamed about.