The private journal of Rebecca “Becky” Shumroke, LCSW
Entry 1 — The Call
My supervisor slid the folder across my desk as if it might burn her fingers. On the tab, in felt-tip letters: ARSON. Inside: police reports, a school’s incident log, photos of a blackened gymnasium. At the center of it all—two twelve-year-old girls, identical twins: Meredith and Marissa Lance.
The court wants to know what’s happening in their home. I’m to assess, to explain, to recommend. I kissed my son, Darien, before I left. He is nine months old and smells like warm milk and soap. He clutched at my hair, laughed, and let me go. I told him and the sitter I’d be back by dinner. I didn’t tell him what I expected to find.
Entry 2 — First Visit
The Lance house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac with hedges trimmed like straight lines on graph paper. When Miranda opened the door—sleek hair, careful makeup—I wondered how long it had taken her to prepare that calm smile.
We sat in a living room that had never met dust. A few minutes later, Daniel arrived from work, uniform shirt creased along his collarbones, apology already in his eyes. They spoke, and I listened: shock, confusion, assurances that “the girls are good, really.”
Then the twins entered. Two pale faces, freckled noses, sea-glass eyes. They moved in sync: a step, a pivot, a stillness. Around each neck hung a silver chain with a pendant—half of an angel, jagged where the halves would meet. Together they would form one figure. Apart, they were broken wings.
“I’m Becky,” I said. “I’m here to talk and to help.”
They didn’t answer. Not a nod. Not a blink.
Without lifting her gaze, Meredith slid a small spiral-bound diary across the coffee table, the way a street magician slides a card. Marissa watched her, then me, her fingers locked around her own half-angel.
We were one, once. Now we’re two. When one breathes, the other inhales. When one cries, the other drowns.
That was the first line inside the diary. I didn’t read further until later. I felt watched, weighed, measured, even as no one spoke.
Entry 3 — Night Reading
Darien fell asleep with one hand in his hair and the other latched around my finger. I set the diary on the table and opened it carefully, as if the paper could bruise.
Two handwritings—one confident, looping (Meredith), one faint, fine-boned (Marissa). Drawings of twin stick figures bound at the chest by a dark thread. In a handful of places, English abandoned them and symbols took over—spirals, hatch-marks, dots in rows.
One must guide. One must follow. That is the law. If I eat, we eat. If I starve, we starve.
I closed the diary and stared at the half-angel charms in my memory. A whole thing, if only they’d bring it together; a broken thing, when apart.
Entry 4 — Lunch
Miranda invited me to stay for lunch. She set out bowls of tomato soup and plates of grilled cheese cut on a diagonal. It smelled like childhood.
Meredith drew her bowl closer, sniffed, then pushed it away. The motion was dismissive and precise. Without looking at anyone, Marissa—who had already lifted her spoon—set it down. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at her reflection in the soup.
“Not hungry?” I asked gently.
Marissa glanced at me—a flicker, a question—then cut her eyes toward her sister. Her spoon stayed on the table. On Meredith’s face: the smallest curve of satisfaction.
We hunger together. To eat alone is betrayal.
That sentence appeared in the diary later, written in Marissa’s fragile hand.
Entry 5 — Favorites
When the twins drifted upstairs, Miranda and I stayed in the kitchen, the clock’s second hand tapping like a metronome.
“When I learned I was carrying twins,” she said, “I felt blessed. And cursed.”
“Why cursed?” I asked.
She stirred a teaspoon through air. “Because one will always swallow the other. Nature writes it that way.” Her smile was polished, empty. “Meredith came first by two minutes. She was stronger, faster. I—” She hesitated, then said it like a confession and a boast. “We all secretly have favorites, don’t we?”
Before I could answer, a scream tore down the stairwell. We ran. In the hallway, Meredith had both fists in Marissa’s hair, wrenching her backward, shrieking strings of nonsense syllables, guttural and fast. Marissa’s mouth made the shape of a cry but no sound came out.
I separated them. Miranda didn’t touch either child; she smoothed her blouse and said, “Girls,” as if the word were a spell to reset the day.
Entry 6 — Small Bonds
Patterns: Meredith enters first, eats first, is spoken to first. Marissa is an echo, soft and late.
Today, while Meredith sulked in the den, Marissa hovered in the doorway where I sat with the diary. I showed her a photo of Darien on my phone—chubby cheeks, carrot puree on his chin, grinning like sunlight. Marissa’s face softened. Her lips parted and formed the ghost of a hi. Footsteps thumped; Meredith appeared. The mouth closed. The light went out.
Later, tucked into a margin of the diary, I found a tiny drawing: an angel with one wing shaded dark, one left bare. Beneath it, in fine script:
I wish I were whole.
Entry 7 — Daniel Speaks
Daniel asked if we could talk—just us—at the kitchen table. He looked like sleep had been rationed into hours and quarters.
“I know Miranda favors Meredith,” he said, eyes on the wood grain. “I see it. The way she brushes her hair first, calls her name first, gives her the bigger slice. I see it. But I take care of them, all of them. I put a roof over their heads. There’s a warm bed every night. Food on the table.” His voice frayed. “I don’t know how it got to this. I just want answers. I just want them to be okay.”
I believed him. Love can be earnest and insufficient at the same time.
Entry 8 — The Burns
On the couch, as I turned another diary page, Marissa reached for it and her sleeve slipped back. Red marks tracked the inside of her forearm—ovals at first glance, ringed, angry. Not a single accident, not once.
“Marissa,” I whispered. “What happened?”
Her eyes filled. She shook her head. The room’s doorway framed Meredith, watching.
I stood, heartbeat in my ears. “Meredith,” I said, level. “Did you do this?”
She tilted her head and, with a child’s sing-song cadence, let gibberish pour from her mouth—too quick to parse, too smug to mistake. Then she smiled and tucked her half-angel pendant inside her shirt.
Miranda stepped between us, palm raised at me, back toward her favorite. “Meredith would never,” she said. “She is strong, but not cruel.”
I looked at Marissa. She stared at the carpet and held her own pendant so tightly the chain cut crescents into her skin. No words, but the truth was a heat in the room.
Entry 9 — Reading, Again
After Darien fell asleep, I typed late into the night: twin language, selective mutism twins, mirroring behavior. I found the Gibbons sisters—the “Silent Twins.” They burned, they wrote, they refused the world. One died; the other began to speak as if a lock had turned inside her chest.
Weeks of visits later, I found a phone number for someone who had known them. An elderly voice answered, thin as paper. I explained the Lances, what I’d seen.
“Jennifer died,” she said. “June spoke. That’s the story, isn’t it? One must fall so the other can rise.” A pause, brittle and long. “Leave those girls be. The Devil has his plans for them.”
She hung up. I didn’t sleep for hours.
Entry 10 — The House Grows Quiet
I began to notice when the house’s sounds went missing—the fridge hum, the TV murmur, the small habits that make a home. Today, at 4:12 p.m., the silence turned heavy and held there, like a lid pressed hard on a pot.
“Girls?” I called up the stairs. No answer. “Miranda, where are they?”
She was at the sink, rinsing a glass so clean the water had nothing to hold. “In their room,” she said, and then, seeing my face, set the glass down too carefully. “Check.”
I checked. The room was empty. The window latch was turned. A chill drafted under the hallway door to the unfinished attic.
Entry 11 — The Roof
I shoved the upstairs hallway window open and cold air slapped my face. The shingles pitched down to the backyard—grass, a crooked maple, the square of concrete where Daniel kept the grill. And there, on the slope of the roof, were the girls.
Meredith had tied twine around Marissa’s wrists. A strip of cloth blindfolded her eyes. Meredith tugged her forward, step by precarious step, toward the roof’s edge.
“Meredith!” I screamed. “Stop! Bring her back inside right now!”
Meredith turned toward me and grinned—wolfish, delighted. She began to chant in that nonsense tongue, faster and faster, then flung her free hand wide as if to mime: It’s a game. See? Just fun.
From below, the back door slammed. “Girls!” Miranda’s voice cracked upward. “Meredith—come down!” Daniel stumbled out behind her, white as chalk. “Oh God,” he whispered. “Oh God.”
Marissa whimpered. She teetered, toes at the gutter. She turned her face toward my voice, blindfold wet with tears. I could feel her reaching for me without moving an inch.
“Marissa,” I said, steady as I could. “Listen to me. You can do this. Take it off.”
Her chest hitched. Her fingers flexed against the twine. She twisted, jerked, twisted again. The twine rasped her skin raw, but one wrist came free. Meredith yanked hard, hissed a flurry of gibberish into her ear, tried to pin her again.
“Take it off!” I shouted. “Look at me!”
Marissa tore the blindfold up. Sunlight struck her eyes. They found mine—wide, terrified, alive. She dragged the twine from her other wrist. Ribboned welts rose in its wake.
Meredith lunged, slammed her forearm across Marissa’s throat, pressed down. The roof was a breath from giving way beneath them. Miranda’s sob was a single syllable of prayer. Daniel didn’t move; the world pinned him.
Marissa’s gaze flicked to me again—just a heartbeat—but in it I saw the choice lay down before her like a road.
I nodded. “Now.”
She shoved. Not a small push: everything she had. Years of hunger held back at lunch. Years of hair yanked and skin burned. Years of being the second name called.
Meredith’s feet skated on the shingles. Her mouth opened and poured out one last stream of jagged syllables—meaningless, merciless—and then she fell backward into the empty air.
The sound of her body hitting the ground below cut the world in half.
Silence, and then Miranda’s scream, a long thread that broke and broke and broke.
On the roof, Marissa crumpled to her knees and clutched her half-angel so hard the chain bit blood from her palm. Her mouth opened. The first words I ever heard from her were a rasp, and they were for me.
“She wanted me gone.”
“I hear you,” I said, useless tears wetting my face. “I hear you.”
Entry 12 — After
The ambulance came. The police came. Lights rolled over the hedges, blue and red and blue and red. Neighbors stood at their fences with their hands over their mouths.
I gave my statement. I kept my voice level. The paramedics carried Meredith away beneath a white sheet. Miranda staggered to a chair and stared at her hands, whispering fragments of those nonsense syllables as if they were prayers that could be stitched together into time before.
Daniel found me in the doorway. “I don’t know how it got like this,” he said. “I thought… If I worked, if I kept the lights on, if there was heat in winter and cool in summer…” He trailed off and pressed his temples, as if the weight of his own house had settled there.
In the kitchen I finished my notes. My conclusion was clinical, because it had to be: prolonged differential treatment, reinforcement of dominance, failure to protect the submissive twin from escalating intra-sibling violence. Neglect can be made of equal parts action and absence. I wrote what I saw.
When I left that night, I pressed my face to Darien’s hair and rocked him while he slept. I listened to the small steady proof of survival in his breath and promised him I would never choose a favorite, not even in the quiet of my heart.
Epilogue — Broken Angel
Three weeks later, I returned to the Lance home. The curtains were open but the house felt dim, as if light entered and then thought better of it.
Marissa saw me and ran straight into my arms. “Hi, Becky,” she said into my shoulder—a warm, ordinary sentence, and it nearly undid me. She stepped back and talked in a small, clear voice about school, about the counselor she actually liked, about the picture of Darien she kept tucked inside her diary, “in case the day feels heavy.”
“How’s your mom?” I asked.
Her face dimmed. “She sits in the knitting room and rocks. She looks out the window a lot.” A pause. “She talks… in that language. The one we used to.”
I found Miranda in the back room. The chair creaked. The needles lay quiet in her lap. When I said her name, she lifted her head and answered me in a staccato string of nonsense syllables, waving one hand without looking, as if brushing off a fly. She had built herself a wall with the very bricks that sealed her daughters off. She was safe there, and alone.
Daniel met me in the hall. “Thank you,” he said. “For seeing what I didn’t. For staying.” His eyes were rimmed red. “I’m sorry it turned out this way.”
We talked logistics: the hearing where Marissa would plead guilty to the gym fire, the counseling schedule that would continue after my involvement ended. Paperwork and plans—small rafts in a wide sea. But the bond we had built was not paperwork.
At the door, Marissa lifted her necklace. The half-angel glinted. She did not ask for the other half. She did not want a whole made from what had hurt her.
“I’m a broken angel now,” she said, not as confession but as fact.
I knelt so our eyes were level. “No,” I told her, and I believed it. “You’re not broken. You’re mended. You’re a survivor.”
She breathed in, long and steady. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Filed and signed,
Rebecca “Becky” Shumroke, LCSW
