Every question produced another excuse.
Diane said they wanted a small ceremony. No large reception. No extended family. Afterward, they planned to fly out and move to another state.
“You’re not inviting me?” I asked.
Her expression softened.
“I don’t want the day to be painful for you.”
“Why would your wedding be painful?”
She hesitated.
“Because Paul should have been there.”
That was all it took.
People only had to say Paul’s name, and I lost the strength to question anything else.
The night before the ceremony, Diane stopped at my house carrying a folder filled with travel papers and documents for the move.
Halfway through our conversation, her phone rang.
She glanced at the screen and immediately stood.
“It’s Evan. I have to go.”
She gathered the papers and hurried out.
Ten minutes later, I noticed her passport lying on my kitchen table.
She needed it for identification and for their flight after the ceremony.
I called her six times.
No answer.
I could have waited until morning, but I did not want her wedding or move to be disrupted because of a forgotten passport.
So I drove to her apartment.
And the man who opened the door looked exactly like the husband I had spent a year mourning.
Inside Diane’s apartment, two suitcases stood beside the sofa. Airline tickets rested on the kitchen counter beside a stack of wedding invitations.
A framed photograph lay facedown near the sink.
I picked it up.
Diane stood beside the man from the doorway at a lakeside restaurant.
He had Paul’s face.
But the smile was different.
Paul always smiled as though he were trying not to laugh.
This man’s smile was cautious, as though he expected happiness to be taken from him.
“My name is Evan,” he said.
I placed the photograph down.
“Who are you?”
His jaw tightened.
“Paul’s brother.”
“Paul didn’t have a brother.”
“He did.”
I stared at him.
Evan drew a slow breath.
“He had a twin.”
The apartment door suddenly opened.
Diane hurried inside, saw me standing beside Evan, and stopped.
“No.”
I turned toward her.
“How long have you known him?”
She did not answer quickly enough.
“How long, Diane?”
“Fourteen months.”
Paul had disappeared twelve months earlier.
I looked back at Evan.
“You were on the boat.”
His silence answered before his words did.
“There were two of us,” he finally admitted. “Paul invited me.”
My knees weakened, and I lowered myself onto the sofa.
Diane remained near the door, clutching her handbag.
Evan sat across from me.
“When we were nine, our mother passed, and our father could no longer care for both of us,” he explained. “Paul went to live with an aunt. I was sent to an uncle several hundred miles away.”
“Paul never told me.”
“Paul told you the version of his life he could live with.”
He said they exchanged letters as children. Then their relatives became involved in a bitter disagreement over money, responsibility, and blame.
By the time Paul was sixteen, he had stopped answering Evan completely.
