Mason followed her as she stopped to check in with ASAC Ben Duncan. “My sister’s been in a car wreck and is in the hospital. I need to be there,” she told him with no preface.

Duncan nodded. “I’ll have extra men at the Fairbankses’ all night in case the press conference stirred some things up. Take as long as you need, and check in with me later.”

Once they were in Mason’s car, Ava explained that her twin had stolen her car and wrecked it.

“How’d she get the car?” Mason asked as he maneuvered his vehicle through the quiet downtown Portland streets.

“I have a hunch.” Ava dug through her purse. “My Honda keys are missing. Damn her! She spilled my purse when I dropped her off earlier today, and she must have grabbed them then.”

Mason was stunned. “She stole your keys?” Her twin stole from her? What kind of relationship did they have?

Ava leaned her head against her window and covered her face with one hand. “I’m going to kill her. I don’t care how injured she is. This is the last time I let her do this to me.”

“The last time? She’s done it before?”

“Not exactly.” Ava sighed. “Last time she broke my television and the microwave when I let her stay with me. I had to make a personal rule that I wouldn’t let her sleep under my roof ever again. Or even come for a visit. I go out of my way to meet her somewhere else if she wants to get together.”

“I don’t understand,” Mason said slowly. “What’s wrong with her?”

Ava was quiet. “It’s complicated,” she finally said.

“I can see that.” Should he press the issue? He wasn’t one to pry, but twice he’d seen Ava rattled by her sister’s actions. He bit his lip, overwhelmed by his desire to know what was going on in the FBI agent’s life. She’d been exposed to the nastiness that’d enveloped him in the last few days. Now it was his turn for a peek at what was upsetting the usually calm and cool agent.

Ava turned to him. “Have you ever loved someone, and the existence of that emotion was completely out of your control? Someone who knows you inside and out? Someone who is closer to you than anyone else in the world? That deep-down soul connection where you physically feel them moving about in the world?”

She paused, and he felt her staring at his profile. He was scared to look directly at her. It might make her stop talking.

But had he? “No. Not even in my marriage,” he answered honestly. “The person who knows me best is my partner, Ray. But even he doesn’t know everything.”

She nodded and slumped back in her seat. “You can’t understand unless you have a twin. There’s no other bond like it. We shared everything. Growing up, she took what was mine just like I helped myself to what was hers. There was no division of anything between us. But as an adult, there have to be boundaries. I learned about those boundaries when I went to college. Jayne never did. She operates as if we’re still twelve.”

“So your car is her car, and she believes there is nothing wrong with that,” Mason guessed.

“Exactly. In her eyes, I’m being selfish by keeping my car from her when she believes that half of it is hers.”

“Even though you paid for it. She doesn’t understand that?”

“No,” said Ava. “She can’t assign a value to something that she never paid for. She’s horrible with money. She’s never saved a dime in her life and flits from job to job and man to man. She operates like the world owes her everything.”

“And you owe her whatever you’ve worked your butt off for,” Mason said. A picture of her twin had started to form in his mind. A narcissist. A woman who believed the world should rotate around her. He’d met women like that, maybe even dated a few. How would it be to grow up with one of those women as your sister? Your twin sister?

“Then there are the addictions. She’s been arrested for meth use and selling oxy. I can’t count the number of times she’s been picked up for drunk and disorderly. Not only is she drunk a lot, she’s a mean drunk. She’s been in and out of every rehab program there is. I paid for two of them and then said no more. But every six months she approaches me with a new one. ‘I know it will work this time,’ she claims. But how can they work when she puts no effort into them? As soon as she walks out the door, she’s back to her old ways.”

“That has to be hard on you,” Mason answered.

“It rips me to pieces,” she said in a soft voice. “She’s part of me. She is me. When I see her like that, it shows who I’d be if I’d made different decisions in my life. It’s only by the grace of God that I’m not the one in the hospital this minute.”

“That’s not true,” asserted Mason. “You don’t have a narcissistic bone in your body. You two might share identical DNA, but somehow it operates differently in you. You are nowhere near the person your sister sounds like.”

“But I am!” Ava cried. “I want it all! I want my life to be a fucking piece of cake. I wish I could curl up in bed all day feeling high as a kite and let the world go on around me. Do you know how great that sounds? I wish I had a Mercedes like my neighbor. I feel a stab of envy every time he drives by. I understand how she feels!”

“So do you walk into his house and steal his keys?” Mason snapped. “Hell, no! That’s what’s different about you. That’s what separates you from your twin. You have morals and standards. Everybody wishes they could escape from their shitty life sometimes, but they don’t do it. They get up and go to work and act like decent human beings.”