Page 7 of The Seven Miracles of Beatrix Holland

Surprise is the Universe’s way of shaking your little snow globe.

—Evie Oxby, Palm Springs and Bat Wings, Netflix

It didn’t make sense—none of it, not one little bit—yet when the woman wrapped her arms around her, Beatrice wanted to cry.

And Beatrice was not a crier.

This woman, though—here was a woman who knew where her faucet was located.

“I can’t believe it.” She wiped tears from her face and laughed, looking at Minna and the woman named Reno. “Oh, my, we have to sit down, Minna, can you bring that chair—yes, Reno, grab that one there.”

Without even choosing to bend her knees, Beatrice found herself seated in a wicker chair, her clone sitting opposite. Near them, Minna and Reno both pulled up chairs, but Beatrice couldn’t have made herself look away from the woman if she’d wanted to.

Which she didn’t.

It was stranger, deeper, than just finding a woman she freakishly resembled. A swell rolled beneath her, as if the entire building had been placed on the ferry, as if she were sailing over something enormous and aqueous. It felt primeval. Damn , she was losing it. “I don’t understand.”

The woman’s eyes—that exact shade of clove, the exact shape that Beatrice saw every day in the mirror—darted to Reno. “Where’s—”

Reno said, “Went to yoga. Twenty minutes ago. Told me to tell you.”

Beatrice sat forward. “Who are you?”

The woman pushed her hair over her shoulder and leaned forward. “I’m Cordelia. And you… you found me. You found us . Finally. You’re alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

Cordelia reached forward, her hand moving quickly, her fingers touching Beatrice’s face. “You are alive, right? I’m not dreaming this?” She glanced at Minna, who nodded encouragingly.

Beatrice said, “I don’t think we’re dreaming.

Maybe… do you have me confused with someone else?

” Perhaps her father had a cousin out here or something?

But Dad always talked about how tragic it was that their family was so small—after her mother had died of lung cancer, it had just been the two of them until Dad had married Naya.

At one point, Beatrice had been such a lonely child, she’d made imaginary friends with her own image in the mirror, chatting to it, swearing that sometimes it answered her back.

Fumbling with a small bag next to her chair, Cordelia drew out some kind of yarn project that involved very small needles. But as if her fingers were having trouble knowing what to do, she made no move to start knitting. “I’m not confused. Not if you’re Beatrix.”

“My name is Beatrice.”

“Beatrice, then. Yes.” A small shake of the head, as if to clear it, and then Cordelia said, “But you died. In the accident.”

“What accident?”

“The car crash when we were thirteen months old. My mother told me that my father and twin sister died.”

This was too much. It simply couldn’t be. Beatrice leaned forward. “When’s your birthday?”

Cordelia’s fingers began to manipulate the yarn around the tiny silver needles. She smiled. “Today, of course. Happy Birthday, Beatrice.”

It felt like a punch to the kidneys. “Plimmerton Hospital?”

“In New Jersey. Yes.”

Was this really happening? Beatrice said, “Twelve thirty p.m.”

“You’re older than I am. I was one fifteen p.m.”

No.

No.

This didn’t happen to normal, regular people who did normal, regular things.

Beatrice paid her taxes by the end of February and got her teeth cleaned every six months.

She bought everything bagels fresh on the weekend and froze them for the week ahead.

Normal people did not find their long-lost twin while on a weekend earmarked for golf.

Move. Think. She sucked in a breath and stood, unsure where to move to next. But it helped to stand up. Something rose inside Beatrice’s chest—a flame of heat that might sear her lungs forever if she didn’t articulate the feeling that was rising inside her. “Is she alive? Our mother?”

Cordelia’s fingers never stopped knitting, but she kept her gaze on Beatrice. “Alive and spitting.”

Minna muttered, “Emphasis on the latter.”

No.

Her mother was dead. Had always been dead.

Beatrice had been furious for so long about the cancer that had taken her mother when Beatrice was less than a year and a half old.

It hadn’t been fair . She’d been robbed of something that all her friends had: a mother to soothe their bumps and sing them to sleep at night.

She didn’t even have a single memory of the woman she’d lost. Sometimes, at Christmas, she’d smell a cranberry candle mixed with the smell of cinnamon, and something would twist inside her, something that felt like the memory of something maternal.

Or was it just a manufactured scent meant to evoke that exact sentiment?

She’d reach to grasp it, but it would slip away from her, and then Dad would yell from across the office that it was time for their daily chess match, and the warm feeling would evaporate back into a dull resentment at death for stealing something she needed.

But her mother was alive.

Cordelia stayed in her chair, her fingers now clicking the needles, but their motion was smooth, as if she didn’t want to frighten Beatrice.

Too late. Beatrice was crashing onto the shores of panic. “Why are you so calm? Why aren’t you freaking the fuck out, too?”

Cordelia paused. Then she said, “Mom said you’d died. But she’s not always the most… trustworthy.”

Minna snorted, and Cordelia shot her a glance before continuing. “I’d have been able to feel it, if you were really gone. I’ve always felt that we’d find each other someday.”

Had Beatrice felt the same thing? Was that where her ribbon of loneliness, the one at her core, came from?

“But still—this could be the wildest coincidence to ever happen, that we were born close to each other and look so much alike.” Okay, that was completely ridiculous. “Do you know your father’s name?”

“I don’t. She would never tell me.”

“My father is Mitchell Barnard. He said my mother’s name was Astrid Evanora Holland Barnard.” All of this will be explained in a way that makes sense. It had to be.

“That’s exactly right. Our mother’s name is Astrid Evanora Holland.” The knitting needles went still in Cordelia’s hands. “Mitchell? Mitchell Barnard. Huh. Now I know my father’s name.”

Beatrice tugged at the neck of her shirt. “Holy fuck. Oh, shit.”

“This is a miracle.” Cordelia’s eyes blazed. “A miracle.”

Miracle number two.

Beatrice’s breathing was high and tight in her chest, and the more she tried to get one good, full breath, the harder it seemed. Had her heart ever banged so loudly before? Was it too fast? Oh, yeah, it was way too fast. It hurt, in fact, bands of heated pain tightening around her chest.

“You okay?” Cordelia’s voice sounded far away.

“Fine.” Her voice was a wheeze.

“How about sitting down again?”

Reno, who had been silent, stood and reached for her arm, but Beatrice shook her off.

“No.” She didn’t need to sit. She needed to—what?

Figure out why her father had lied to her for her whole life ?

The one person she trusted most in life, her rock—he’d lied, this whole time.

Struggling to raise her voice over the pounding of her heart—surely they could all hear it—she said, “So was there an accident?”

Cordelia lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “I don’t know. I’m inclined to say no. That they just separated us like those half-heart necklaces.”

“Dad wouldn’t have just let a child—you— go .

It doesn’t make sense.” But did any of this make sense?

The tightness in her chest clamped again, and she dropped back into the chair she’d vacated.

Darkness moved in at the edges of her vision, and her breathing sounded like a fish lying on a dock, the desperate flapping of her gills trying to get oxygen.

A high whine started at the back of her head, as if someone had turned on a saw.

She turned her head to find the noise, but instead of ascertaining the source, she saw Cordelia’s knitting drop to the floor as Cordelia leaped toward her. “What? What’s going—” But her voice wasn’t really working, and her lungs cramped…

Hands touched her shoulders then, Reno’s low voice saying something in her ear. Beatrice was gently folded in half as her head was urged down between her knees.

“Take a breath. There you go. Just give it a minute.”

The whine ceased almost immediately. It took a bit longer for the darkness to recede, but clearheadedness came right on its heels. The stubbornness that flooded through her veins felt like ice-cold water, exactly what she needed.

She sat up. “I’m not having a panic attack.”

“Of course you aren’t,” said Cordelia.

Great. She was being patronized. “I’ve never had one, but I know all about them.” Grant got them sometimes, usually after he lost a game of golf. “That wasn’t one.”

“Probably just light-headedness.”

Cordelia was right. That was all it was. No matter that she’d never come close to fainting before. This was a day for new things, apparently. Grateful for the way the air seemed to fill her lungs completely again, she turned to face Cordelia, who had moved her own chair close to hers.

“You’re my twin,” said Beatrice.

Cordelia nodded.

Now that her brain had been handed back to her, Beatrice took a moment to stare at this woman. After all, this was what Beatrice was normally good at—clear judgment and rational thought.

Cordelia’s nose leaned the slightest bit to the right—there, that was different. Living in a town chock-full of fake noses, Beatrice had always been idiotically proud of her perfectly straight snoot. Cordelia’s lips were maybe a touch fuller? “Your freckles.”

Nodding, Cordelia said, “They’re in different places than yours.”

“It’s so weird .” It was like seeing a constellation hung in the wrong part of the sky.

Cordelia rocked herself backward, and Beatrice felt glad for the increased distance.

At the same time, she wanted to reach forward to grab her twin’s hands.

Cordelia’s fingers were curling in and out of fists, and somehow Beatrice knew she wanted the same thing.

Just to be on the safe side, she stuffed her own hands into the pockets of her jeans.

Cordelia said, “I did 23andMe. And Ancestry.com. Anything that would take my spit and give me a result, I signed up for. I waited.”

“It never even crossed my mind.” Dad said that the two of them were all each other had.

We’re all we need, Button. His parents had died when he was young—but, Jesus, had they?

He had no siblings, or was that just what he’d said?

An electrical storm flashed at the base of her skull.

That anger was going to boil over soon, but right now, she didn’t need to stoke the heat. “I thought Dad and I were alone.”

“Did you really feel alone? I mean”—Cordelia looked down at her hands, the ones that looked like Beatrice’s, but covered with silver rings—“I just kept waiting for you.”

I was so lonely. But she’d rather die than say it out loud. “What’s our—what’s she like?”

“She’s incredible.”

Minna said, “Incredibly difficult.”

Reno gave a snort-huff sound.

Cordelia went on as if she hadn’t heard them. “She’s powerful, and opinionated, and brilliant. She knows everything. We co-own Which Craft, but she can be a little possessive of it. It’s weird that she’s not here, honestly, but she’ll be back any minute. Are you ready to meet her?”

Absolutely not. No way.

But a door in the back creaked, and a loud voice filled the air. “Ah, so this is why my ears were burning! And you . I should have known.”