Lunar Reverie
Today was the seventh anniversary of the plane crash that took my twin sister, Chloe.
My husband, Julian, checked the watch on his wrist and urged me on. “I’ve only blocked off ten minutes for this visit. Hurry up and lay the flowers.”
He was a pathological stickler for time, meticulously managing every minute and second of his life. Shopping was sixty minutes, intimacy was fifteen minutes, and dinner was ten minutes…
As he walked back to the car to grab an umbrella, his phone slipped from his hand, hit the ground, and lit up with a cloud calendar notification. It was his hidden master schedule for family. I stole a glance at it, and my blood instantly ran cold.
The entry for me read, “Spend two hours.”
And the very next entry ten minutes later read, “Cemetery visit ends. Head to the Southside residence immediately to pick up Chloe and our son for his toddler’s gym class.”
I stared at my sister’s photo on the tombstone, finding it all ironic. So the past seven years, spent racing against the clock, were nothing more than an extreme time-management strategy Julian had devised for her while she was pretending to be dead.
Julian walked back over under the umbrella. He picked up his phone and frowned. “Riley, your ten minutes are up. Stop dawdling.”
Wiping the rainwater from the tombstone, I let out a liberated smile and said, “I'm not dawdling. It just struck me that Chloe must be having a wonderful time in hell. With the Devil and his demons keeping her company, I’m sure she’d never want to leave.”