Chapter Text
By the time Eleanor Prentiss arrived at Camp Greenbriar, she had been awake for almost seventeen hours, had crossed five time zones, and had already decided that Maine contained too many trees.
This was not a criticism of trees in general. Nora liked trees perfectly well when they were arranged with some consideration, preferably along a pavement or behind a wrought-iron fence. The ones surrounding Greenbriar seemed to have been left entirely unsupervised. They crowded the narrow road on both sides of the car, branches knitting together overhead while the driver followed a series of hand-painted signs that became progressively more cheerful and less useful.
GREENBRIAR, read the first.
YOU'RE ALMOST THERE, promised the second.
The third featured a cartoon moose wearing sunglasses and offered no directional information whatsoever.
Beside her, Emily had been pretending not to check her phone for the last twenty minutes. She held it face down against one knee, although it lit beneath her palm every few seconds, and each time it did, her mouth tightened in a way Nora knew meant somebody somewhere was making an international problem unnecessarily complicated.
“You can answer it,” Nora said.
Emily looked at her. “I can also ignore it.”
“You are ignoring it quite aggressively.”
“It’s a skill.”
Nora glanced back out the window so her mother would not see her smile. Emily caught it anyway. She usually did.
The camp appeared all at once through the trees: a wide blue lake flashing under the afternoon sun, rows of dark green cabins, and a main lodge decorated with enough triangular bunting to suggest the Americans had recently discovered it and were determined to make up for lost time. Children moved everywhere in brightly colored T-shirts. Some were dragging duffel bags. Others were shouting across distances that did not seem to require shouting. A girl ran past the car carrying a canoe paddle and no canoe.
Nora stared at the scene. “You said it was academically focused.”
“It has a library.”
“So does prison.”
Emily laughed, which was almost worth the flight.
She had suggested the camp in February, presenting the brochure over breakfast with a casualness Nora recognized as suspicious. Greenbriar offered fencing, sailing, photography, wilderness courses, and something called collaborative leadership, which Emily had described as an excellent opportunity to meet people outside Nora’s school. Nora had pointed out that she already knew people outside her school. Emily had pointed out that her grandmother and the woman who prepared their dry cleaning did not constitute a varied social circle.
The argument had continued for three weeks. Emily had won largely because she had already paid the deposit.
Their car stopped beside the registration lodge, and a counsellor in a green polo shirt immediately appeared to help with the luggage. She looked barely old enough to have survived camp herself, but she greeted Nora with alarming enthusiasm and attached a paper tag to the largest suitcase.
“Eleanor Prentiss?”
“Nora,” she corrected.
“Nora. Great. Hawthorn Cabin.” The counsellor consulted her clipboard. “You’re in the east group. We have three other international campers this session, although one is from Toronto, so I don’t know if that feels international to you.”
Nora looked at Emily, who had become very interested in tipping the driver.
“It counts,” Nora said, because somebody had to be kind.
The counsellor carried her suitcase toward a pile of bags and left them alone beside the car. For the first time since Heathrow, Emily did not appear to have anything prepared to say. She smoothed an invisible crease from the shoulder of Nora’s jacket, then tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. The gesture was familiar enough to be embarrassing and comforting in equal measure.
“You have the number for the London office,” Emily said. “And my mobile. And your grandmother’s number.”
“And the emergency number for the embassy.”
“That one was mostly a joke.”
“You highlighted it.”
“I enjoy stationery.” Emily adjusted the collar she had already adjusted once. “You don’t have to stay if you hate it.”
Nora had spent the last four months explaining that she would almost certainly hate it. Now, faced with the careful neutrality in her mother’s voice, she understood that Emily was offering her an escape and hoping she would not take it.
“I have survived twelve years with Grandmother,” Nora said. “I expect I can manage six weeks with a lake.”
Emily’s expression softened. “That’s my girl.”
The hug came next, brief at first because they were in public, then tighter when neither of them let go at the expected moment. Nora breathed in her mother’s perfume and that faint coffee scent that seemed to follow her everywhere. She had never been away from Emily for longer than nine days. Six weeks had sounded reasonable in London. In Maine, surrounded by strangers and feral trees, it felt less like a summer and more like an administrative error.
Emily kissed her temple before stepping back. “Call me when you get settled.”
“It will be after midnight at home.”
“I didn’t say call London.”
Nora narrowed her eyes. Emily smiled, entirely unrepentant, and got into the car.
Nora remained beside the lodge until the black sedan disappeared around the bend. Only then did she turn toward the camp and discover two girls openly staring at her from the porch.
She stared back until they stopped.
It seemed important to establish expectations early.
Twenty-three minutes later, a dark blue SUV came around the same bend too quickly, sent a small cloud of dust across the registration lane and stopped at an angle that suggested the driver considered painted parking lines more of a recommendation than a rule.
Charlie Jareau was out before the engine had fully gone quiet.
“Charlotte.”
She paused with one foot on the gravel and leaned back inside. “I’m getting my bag.”
“You were leaving without sunscreen.”
“I was going to come back.”
JJ held up the bottle she had been trying to press into Charlie’s hands since they left Virginia. “You say that as if I haven’t known you your entire life.”
Charlie took it and shoved it into the outside pocket of her duffel, where it landed upside down beside two granola bar wrappers and a single red sock. Her mother looked at the pocket, then at her. Charlie smiled with all the innocence she could assemble on short notice.
“I’ll organize it in the cabin.”
“That would be a historic first.”
JJ came around the car carrying the second bag, her sunglasses pushed into her hair and her phone tucked between her shoulder and ear. She was wearing jeans, a pale blue shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows, and the expression she used when work had called during time that was meant to belong to Charlie.
“No, I’m listening,” she said into the phone. “Send it to Reid, but tell him not to call me unless he finds something actionable. Something actually actionable, not something he can explain for forty minutes until it becomes actionable through exhaustion.”
She listened, sighed and glanced at Charlie. “Because I’m dropping my daughter at camp, Garcia.”
There was an audible burst of sound from the other end. JJ pulled the phone slightly away from her ear.
“Yes, I took pictures. No, you cannot see them until you promise not to make a slideshow.” Another pause. “A slideshow with transitions is still a slideshow.”
Charlie grabbed her duffel and started toward registration. JJ caught the back of her T-shirt without looking.
“I’ll call you later,” she told Garcia, ending the call before an answer could arrive. Then she lowered her sunglasses and studied Charlie properly. “Are you trying to escape before I say goodbye?”
“I thought we did that at home.”
“You ate half a waffle and asked whether you could bring pepper spray. That was breakfast.”
“You said no.”
“Because you’re twelve.”
“The bears don’t know that.”
JJ tried to keep a straight face and failed. She had been doing that more often during the drive, laughing at things that were only moderately funny and turning the radio up whenever the conversation approached the fact that Charlie would be gone until August. Charlie understood the strategy because she had been using a version of it herself. She had complained about the camp rules, the drive, and the possibility of organized singing, when what she really wanted was to ask whether six weeks could change the shape of home.
It was only the two of them there most of the time. Other people passed through constantly—Garcia with baked goods, Rossi with food that had taken three days to prepare, Morgan whenever something in the house needed fixing and JJ refused to admit it—but home was built around two cereal bowls in the sink and two pairs of shoes near the door. Charlie had wanted camp. She had chosen it from a stack of brochures and argued that twelve was old enough to spend one summer somewhere without an FBI agent checking the locks twice every night.
She had not expected JJ to agree.
At the registration table, a woman with a sunburn across her nose found her name and gave her a green wristband. “Charlotte Jareau. Birch Cabin, west group.”
“Charlie,” she said.
“Of course. Any chance you’re related to another camper?”
JJ’s hand stilled on the medical form. “Why?”
“No reason. Thought I saw—” She glanced past them toward the path, but whoever she had seen was no longer there. “Never mind. Long afternoon.”
JJ watched her for a moment with the particular focus that made adults reconsider what they had just said. Charlie nudged her before she could turn a camp check-in into an interview.
“Mom.”
“Right.” JJ signed the bottom of the form, checked something she had already checked and handed it over. “Penicillin allergy is noted in all three places.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The inhaler is for exercise-induced asthma. She hasn’t needed it in over a year, but—”
“Mom.”
JJ looked at Charlie. “I’m stopping.”
She did, although the effort was visible.
They walked together as far as the fork in the path where parents were encouraged to say goodbye. The camp had placed a wooden sign there painted with the words ADVENTURE STARTS HERE, which Charlie thought was unnecessarily aggressive under the circumstances.
JJ put both hands on her shoulders. “You call if you need anything. It doesn’t matter what time it is or what it is. If you’re homesick, if someone bothers you, if you just want to hear a familiar voice—”
“I know.”
“And you don’t have to stay to prove anything.”
“I know that too.” Charlie’s throat had begun to feel inconveniently tight. She leaned forward before either of them could make it worse. “You’re going to be late.”
JJ wrapped her arms around her. “I’m the boss. I’m allowed.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how the FBI works.”
“You’d be surprised.”
She kissed Charlie’s hair and held on for another second. When she stepped away, her eyes were bright behind her sunglasses, but she smiled as if Charlie had not noticed.
“Have fun.”
“Try not to arrest anyone while I’m gone.”
“No promises.”
Charlie watched the SUV leave, then hauled her duffel higher onto her shoulder and followed the signs toward Birch Cabin. She made it approximately thirty feet before a girl coming from the opposite direction walked straight into her.
The collision sent Charlie’s water bottle onto the path. A paperback fell from the other girl’s hands and landed face down in the dirt.
“Seriously?” Charlie said, bending for the bottle.
“You were on the wrong side.”
The accent made Charlie look up.
For one disorienting second, she thought somebody had placed a mirror in the middle of the woods.
The girl standing in front of her had the same dark-blonde hair, although hers was cut neatly below her shoulders instead of pulled into Charlie’s collapsing ponytail. She had the same grey-blue eyes, the same nose, and the same faint dusting of freckles across her cheeks. Even the small line between her eyebrows looked familiar, although Charlie had only seen it on her own face when JJ told her she was being unreasonable.
The differences arrived more slowly. The other girl wore pressed navy shorts and a white camp shirt that had somehow survived the afternoon without acquiring a stain. A slim watch circled her wrist. Her posture was so straight it seemed personally judgmental.
She was staring at Charlie with equal disbelief, which Charlie found irritating. If anyone had the right to be disturbed, it was the person who had just discovered a formal version of herself in the forest.
“Why do you look like that?” Charlie asked.
The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Like what?”
“Like me.”
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“I asked first.”
“That doesn’t make the question intelligent.”
Charlie let out a short laugh. “Wow. Do you always talk like you’re about to fire someone from a company you don’t own?”
“Only when someone opens a conversation by criticizing my face.”
Two campers had stopped nearby. One whispered something to the other and looked between them with open fascination. Charlie became aware that more people were beginning to notice.
She picked up the fallen book and held it out. The cover said something about twentieth-century espionage. That seemed right.
“You read spy books at summer camp?”
“You wear mismatched socks in public?”
Charlie looked down. The left one was blue. The right one, visible above her sneaker, was red.
“It’s a fashion choice.”
“I’m sure.”
The girl took the book. Their fingers brushed, and something strange moved across her expression—not recognition exactly, but the physical discomfort of encountering something that felt familiar without any reason it should.
Charlie felt it too. She stepped back first.
“I’m Charlie.”
The girl hesitated. “Nora.”
Neither offered a surname.
A whistle sounded from the direction of the lake, followed by a counsellor calling for the east group. Nora tucked the book beneath one arm.
“Try to remain on your side of the path,” she said.
Charlie watched her walk away. “You were on my side!”
Nora lifted one hand without turning around, a gesture so dismissive and so precise that Charlie disliked her immediately.
It would have been easier if everyone else had agreed to do the same.
By dinner, half the camp had found a reason to walk past Charlie’s table. Some tried to be subtle, which usually meant looking at her and then turning toward Nora so quickly they nearly injured themselves. Others asked direct questions.
“Why haven’t you told me you had a twin?” Charlie’s friend, Maya, wanted to know.
“I don’t.” Charlie stabbed a piece of lettuce with more force than necessary.
Across the dining hall, Nora looked up at exactly the same moment. Their eyes met. Nora returned her attention to her plate as if Charlie had failed to interest her.
Maya followed the look. “Have you asked your mom?”
“Mom would probably have mentioned another child.”
“Maybe you’re cousins.”
“I’ve met my cousins.”
“Clones?” suggested a girl farther down the table.
Charlie considered her. “That is somehow less annoying than the twin theory.”
At the east-group table, Nora was enduring a similar investigation with considerably less patience. She informed her cabinmates that millions of people shared superficial physical characteristics and that the human brain was predisposed to exaggerate similarity once it had been suggested. This would have been more convincing if Charlie had not laughed at something across the room and revealed the same crooked canine tooth Nora saw every morning in the mirror.
She told herself it meant nothing.
People often looked alike. Strangers were mistaken for celebrities every day, usually after poor lighting and several drinks. Somewhere in the world there was almost certainly another woman who looked like her mother, although Nora suspected that woman would be far less intimidating.
Charlie looked like Nora because genetics had a finite number of arrangements and occasionally lacked imagination. That was all.
Then Charlie reached for her water with her left hand, pushed her hair behind her right ear and tilted her head while Maya spoke. Nora had watched herself perform that exact sequence in video calls often enough to know it was not especially common.
She looked away before Charlie could catch her staring again.
The fencing activity took place two days later.
Nora had selected it on her registration form because she had fenced since she was eight and because every camp brochure promised at least one activity designed to reassure parents that six weeks in the wilderness counted as personal development. She arrived at the outdoor court early, checked the condition of the masks and endured ten minutes of instruction clearly intended for people who had never held a foil.
Charlie arrived late with Maya, still chewing the final bite of an apple. She had chosen fencing that morning after learning Nora was assigned to the advanced group.
This was, she told herself, curiosity rather than a terrible idea.
The instructor divided them by experience. Charlie had none, but she was quick, coordinated and unwilling to admit when something was difficult. By the end of the first session she had learned enough to beat two beginners and become dangerous to herself. Nora watched from the opposite side of the court while pretending not to.
“You want to try?” Charlie asked when the instructor called for a final demonstration.
Nora adjusted her glove. “Try what?”
“Losing gracefully.”
Several campers made the delighted sound of people witnessing a bad decision that would not affect them personally.
The instructor looked between the girls. “Foils only. Standard target. The first to five touches. And I mean this sincerely: no improvising.”
Nora lowered her mask. “That instruction was for you.”
“You really do think you’re better than everyone.” Charlie put on hers.
“No. Just you.”
The bout began badly for Charlie and improved mostly because she refused to behave in any manner Nora recognized. Nora had better form, cleaner footwork, and years of training. Charlie had speed, instinct and no respect for the rhythm of a conventional attack. She retreated when Nora expected her to advance, recovered from mistakes by creating entirely new ones and scored her first touch by ducking so inelegantly that the instructor closed his eyes.
Nora won the next two points. Charlie took the fourth. By the time they reached four touches each, every camper in the activity had gathered around the strip.
“Final point,” the instructor warned. “Keep it controlled.”
They saluted. Nora could hear her own breath inside the mask and, strangely, Charlie’s on the other side of the mesh, as if the sound had been copied and returned to her half a second later.
Charlie attacked first. Nora parried, stepped to the side and saw an opening. Charlie recovered faster than she should have. Their foils landed almost simultaneously, the scoring lights flashing together.
“Stop,” the instructor called.
Neither did.
Charlie pushed forward. Nora met her. The blades struck with a sharp metallic sound, once, twice, and then Nora caught the edge of Charlie’s mask with her guard. The fastening slipped. Charlie’s mask fell onto the grass.
The entire court went quiet.
Nora froze. It was worse at close range, with Charlie flushed from exertion and her hair escaping in every direction. She did not merely resemble Nora. She looked like a version of her that had spent twelve years making different choices.
Charlie stared through the mesh. “Are you going to take that off, or is dramatic suspense another British hobby?”
Nora removed her mask.
Someone near the back whispered, “Oh my God.”
Charlie recovered first. “I still think I look better.”
“That’s unlikely.”
The instructor stepped between them before the argument could become another bout. She declared the result a tie, which satisfied no one, and assigned them to opposite activity groups for the remainder of the week.
The decision might have ended the problem if Charlie had not discovered, later that evening, that someone had replaced every item in her laundry bag with neatly folded white tennis clothes in Nora’s size.
Nora returned to Hawthorn Cabin after dinner to find her bed missing.
It was located twenty minutes later, floating approximately fifteen feet from shore with her pillow arranged neatly against the headboard. A canoe had to be borrowed for its recovery. The mattress never entirely lost the smell of lake water.
At three seventeen the next morning, six alarms began ringing inside Birch Cabin. They had been hidden beneath mattresses, inside shoes, and above the ceiling rafters. Each played a different recording of Big Ben.
Charlie responded by switching the signs outside the cabins and redirecting the entire east group to a sunrise bird-watching session that did not exist.
Nora waited until the following afternoon, then climbed onto Birch Cabin’s roof and raised a large British flag above it while Charlie was at the lake. Beneath it, she hung a smaller handwritten sign declaring the building a newly acquired territory.
“You know this is historically offensive, right?” Charlie called when she found her.
Nora secured the final knot. “Only if you surrender.”
“I don’t surrender.”
“I’ve noticed.”
The camp staff removed the flag, returned the stolen clothes, and delivered a speech about community that both girls listened to with respectful expressions. For nearly twenty-four hours, nothing happened.
Then Charlie placed a plastic snake in Nora’s boot.
Nora put green dye in Charlie’s shampoo.
Charlie wrapped every item on Nora’s bunk in aluminum foil, and to top it all off, Nora submitted Charlie’s name for a solo performance at the camp dance.
The dance was held at the end of their first week in the recreation hall, a long wooden building transformed with paper lanterns, strings of lights and several hundred feet of silver streamers. The counsellors had pushed tables against the walls and created a snack station beside the stage. Music vibrated through the floorboards. Campers moved in loose groups, dressed in the few clothes their parents had apparently considered appropriate for both rural Maine and social interaction.
Nora wore a dark green dress Emily had slipped into her suitcase at the last minute. It was simple, soft, and slightly more grown-up than anything else she had brought. When Nora had protested that she would never need it, Emily had said there was always one evening nobody told you to prepare for.
Charlie appeared fifteen minutes later wearing the same dress. Not something similar. The exact same dress, although hers was blue and paired with white sneakers.
Nora looked down at herself and then across the room. Charlie followed her gaze and made a face.
“Absolutely not,” Charlie said.
“For once, we agree.”
Maya, standing beside Charlie, took in the dresses with unconcealed delight. “You look like a before-and-after photo, but I can’t tell which one is which.”
“She copied me,” both girls said.
They stopped.
Charlie folded her arms. Nora did the same before realizing it and dropped them immediately.
The resemblance had become less amusing over the course of the week. Campers took photographs of them when they thought the girls were not looking. A counsellor called Nora by Charlie’s name during breakfast. The camp nurse had pulled both files after noticing they shared a penicillin allergy and then spent an uncomfortable amount of time comparing the forms. Neither girl asked what else she had found.
It was easier to remain angry. Anger gave the similarity somewhere to go.
“You put my name on the performance list,” Charlie said.
“You deserved it.”
“For the snake?”
“For the bed.”
“That was four pranks ago. Keep up.”
The first notes of a song began onstage. A counsellor approached with a microphone and a smile. “Charlie? You’re on.”
Charlie looked at Nora. Nora smiled sweetly.
“Actually,” Charlie said, taking the microphone, “this is a duet.”
Before Nora understood the threat, Charlie caught her hand and pulled her toward the stage.
The performance lasted less than a minute. Neither girl knew the song well enough to sing it alone, much less together, and Nora responded to being publicly ambushed by attempting to hand the microphone back. Charlie held on. Nora pulled. The sound system produced a shriek that sent several campers covering their ears.
“Let go,” Nora said through her teeth.
“You let go.”
“This was your idea.”
“This entire thing was your idea.”
The microphone slipped free and struck a bowl of punch on the nearby refreshments table. Red liquid swept across the white tablecloth and poured over the edge directly onto Charlie’s sneakers.
Charlie stared down. “You did that on purpose.”
“How could I possibly have—”
Charlie reached for a napkin, caught the corner of the tablecloth and pulled. A tray of cupcakes slid toward Nora. She stepped back, collided with another camper and felt frosting hit the side of her face.
The room went briefly silent.
Charlie made the mistake of laughing.
Nora picked up the nearest cupcake.
What followed was later described by the camp director as an altercation, a food incident and, in an email to both families, an unfortunate escalation during a community event. Nora considered all three descriptions technically accurate. Charlie maintained that the third cupcake had been thrown by somebody else.
They ended the evening seated side by side outside the director’s office, sticky with punch and buttercream, while music continued on the other side of the lake.
Charlie scraped frosting from her wrist. “You’re completely insane.”
Nora wiped the side of her face with a damp towel. “You put a bed in a lake.”
“You dyed my hair green.”
“It washed out.”
“Eventually.”
The office door opened. Director Walsh stood in the doorway, a broad woman with silver hair and the exhausted calm of someone who had managed summer camps for too long to be surprised by children. She looked at them for several seconds.
“I have spoken to your cabin counsellors,” she said. “And the fencing instructor. And the nurse. And the person who had to retrieve a bed from the lake.”
Charlie looked at the floor. Nora examined the towel.
“The two of you seem to bring out a very specific quality in each other.”
“She started it,” Charlie said.
Nora turned. “You walked into me.”
“You were on the wrong side of the path.”
Director Walsh closed her eyes briefly. “Thank you for illustrating my point.”
Greenbriar did not send children home unless someone was unsafe, she explained, and despite their dedicated efforts, neither Nora nor Charlie had crossed that line. Instead, they would spend the next week in what they called ”The Isolation Cabin," a small building beyond the archery field traditionally used when repairs displaced campers from the main cabins. They would take meals there, report to activities separately, and complete a list of chores together. If they demonstrated that they could coexist without damaging camp property or each other, they could return to their groups before the following weekend.
“Together?” Nora asked.
“In the same cabin?” Charlie added.
Director Walsh’s expression almost became a smile. “Consider it collaborative leadership.”
The Isolation Cabin contained two narrow beds, one wardrobe, a small table, and an alarming number of carved initials. It stood far enough from the other cabins that the sounds of the camp arrived softened by trees. Someone had left a lantern on the porch and a stack of clean blankets inside. Their bags had already been delivered and placed on opposite sides of the room, presumably by counsellors unwilling to remain for the reunion.
Charlie chose the bed nearest the window. Nora was left with no choice, but at least the bed was on the other side from Charlie.
For nearly an hour they did not speak. Nora unpacked her clothes, refolded the items that had shifted in transit, and arranged her toiletries along one edge of the table. Charlie emptied half her duffel onto her mattress while searching for pyjamas, found a sweatshirt she had forgotten packing and decided it was close enough.
The silence should have been peaceful. Instead, each movement made Nora aware of the other girl: the familiar rhythm of her breathing, the way she tapped two fingers against her leg while reading the chore list, the small sound she made when she could not open a jar.
Nora looked over before she could stop herself.
Charlie sat cross-legged on her bed with an open sleeve of Oreos beside her and the jar of peanut butter braced between her knees. She twisted the lid again.
“It’s vacuum-sealed,” Nora said.
“I know how jars work," Charlie said, still struggling.
“Evidence suggests otherwise.”
Charlie held it out. “Go ahead, Your Majesty.”
Nora took the jar, struck the edge of the lid against the bedframe, and opened it. Charlie watched with reluctant respect.
“My mom does that.”
Nora handed it back. “So does mine.”
Charlie separated an Oreo, spread peanut butter across the cream and replaced the top. She took a bite. Nora stared at her.
“What?” Charlie said with a bite of cookie in her mouth.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
Nora crossed to her own suitcase, opened the front compartment, and removed a packet of Oreos. Emily had put them there for the flight. From a side pocket, she produced a smaller jar of peanut butter.
For the first time since meeting, Charlie did not have an immediate answer.
Nora sat on her bed and prepared one exactly the same way.
“That’s weird,” Charlie said.
“It’s not especially unusual.”
“Maya says it’s disgusting.”
“Maya wore glitter eyeliner to breakfast.”
“Fair.”
They ate in silence for a moment, watching each other with less hostility and considerably more caution.
Charlie noticed the silver medical tag around Nora’s wrist when she reached for another biscuit. “Penicillin?”
Nora glanced down. “Amoxicillin specifically, but they prefer the broader warning. I developed hives when I was two.”
“Me too.” Charlie held up her own wrist. The camp bands were different colors, but the allergy tags were identical. “I was eighteen months.”
Something tightened low in Nora’s stomach. “When is your birthday?”
Charlie hesitated now. “October eleventh.”
Nora stopped moving.
Outside, insects pressed themselves against the screen, and the lake shifted quietly beyond the trees. The entire camp seemed to have receded, leaving only the small cabin and the girl sitting across from her with her face.
“What year?” Nora asked.
"2014," Charlie told her.
It was the same.
“No,” Nora said, although there had been no question.
Charlie set down the Oreo. “Maybe the forms got mixed up.”
“Before we arrived?”
“Maybe one of our parents wrote it wrong.”
“The day and the year?”
“I’m trying to come up with something.”
Nora pushed her hair back, suddenly too warm. Charlie’s eyes followed the movement and fixed on the space behind her right ear.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Turn around.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You have something behind your ear.”
Nora reached up. Beneath her fingertips was the small crescent-shaped birthmark Emily sometimes touched when she tucked Nora’s hair away from her face.
Charlie moved her own hair. “Is it like this?”
The mark behind Charlie’s ear was the same size and shape.
Neither of them spoke.
The explanation had begun to form, impossible and obvious, but Nora could not allow herself to look directly at it. She stood too quickly and crossed to her suitcase, needing motion, distance, or anything that did not require answering the question written across Charlie’s face.
“People can have similar birthmarks,” she said.
“And the same birthday.”
“Coincidences happen.”
“And the same allergy.”
“Allergies are common.”
“And the same entire face?”
Nora pulled open the suitcase. “Stop.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re implying—”
“I don’t even know what I’m implying.” Charlie came to stand beside her. “I’m trying to figure out why you look exactly like me and were born on the same day.”
Nora lifted a stack of clothes and placed it on the bed. Her hands were no longer entirely steady. “There will be an explanation.”
“Great. What is it?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
“Thank you, Charlie.”
She reached for the zippered inner pocket, but Charlie saw the edge of the photograph first. It had slipped partly free when the suitcase was moved, a rectangle of cream paper worn soft at the corners.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Nora tried to push it back.
Charlie caught the edge. “It looks like—”
“Don’t.”
They both pulled. The photograph came free without tearing, and Charlie stumbled backward holding it.
Nora’s anger disappeared beneath a sudden wave of fear. “Give it back.”
Charlie looked down.
The photograph showed Emily many years younger, sitting on the edge of a picnic table in a white shirt with her dark hair falling loose around her face. The image ended just beyond her shoulder in an uneven vertical line. Emily was not looking at the camera. She was turned toward whoever had once occupied the missing half, smiling with a softness Nora knew but rarely saw captured in photographs.
Charlie went completely still.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“It belongs to my mother.”
“That’s Emily Prentiss.”
Nora stared at her. “How do you know her name?”
Charlie did not answer. She crossed to her own duffel and began pulling things out with none of her earlier carelessness. A shoe hit the floor, followed by two T-shirts and the sunscreen bottle JJ had forced into her bag. Finally, she found a book wedged near the bottom. From between its pages, she removed another piece of photograph.
The paper was the same color. The cut along one side had the same irregular shape.
Nora recognized the woman in it before Charlie reached her.
JJ was younger too, her blonde hair pulled loosely back, one hand lifted as if she had been caught halfway through telling a story. She was laughing at someone outside her half of the frame. Nora had seen her before in old BAU photographs she was never supposed to find, usually standing near Emily without touching her. There was another photograph hidden at the back of Emily’s desk, one Nora had discovered years ago while looking for a charger: JJ asleep on a sofa, her head resting against Emily’s shoulder, Emily’s cheek against her hair.
When Nora had asked who she was, Emily had gone quiet for so long that Nora wished she could take the question back.
Jennifer, Emily had finally said. Someone I worked with a long time ago.
Across the cabin, Charlie was looking at Emily’s half with the expression of someone recognizing a ghost. She had seen that same face in the photographs JJ kept beneath a stack of old case files in the locked drawer of her desk. Most of them included other people—Rossi beside a grill, Garcia in a dress covered in flowers, Morgan with one arm around Reid—but Emily was in almost every image. Charlie had once found one of her alone, asleep at a kitchen table with a mug beside her hand. It was the only photograph worn at the edges.
She had asked JJ about the dark-haired woman when she was seven.
Prentiss, JJ had said, too quickly. An old friend.
Nora stepped closer, and, without discussing it, they placed the two pieces on the table. The torn edges met perfectly, widening the picture until Emily sat beside JJ on the picnic table with their knees touching. JJ was laughing at something she had just said, but Emily was not laughing anymore. She was looking at JJ as if the rest of the afternoon had blurred beyond her, as if the person beside her were the only part of the photograph she had known would matter later.
Nora had seen her mother pleased, proud, and amused. She had seen her affectionate in the private, careful way Emily allowed herself to be affectionate, but she had never seen her look at anyone like that. Charlie, meanwhile, had never seen JJ be looked at that way at all.
They stood shoulder to shoulder over the completed photograph. In the dark window above the table, their reflections hovered side by side: the same eyes, the same mouth, the same face arranged around two entirely different lives.
Nora spoke first, although her voice did not sound like her own.
“That’s Jennifer Jareau.”
Charlie looked at her.
“That’s Emily Prentiss.”
Neither of them asked how the other knew.
For the first time since they had met, there was no argument left between them. There was only the photograph, the impossible familiarity of the girl standing beside it and the growing certainty that their mothers had each told them half of a story.