The locked drawer opened only three inches before the older woman stopped pulling.
The maid stood on the other side of the vanity, one hand wrapped around the emerald at her throat.
“Who’s buried in my mother’s grave?” she asked again.
The older woman stared into the narrow darkness of the drawer.
For several seconds, she seemed unable to decide whether opening it had been a mistake.
Then she pulled it the rest of the way.
Inside were no jewels.
There was an old photograph, a bundle of letters tied with a faded ribbon, and a narrow envelope browned around the edges.
The maid looked at the photograph first.
Two young women stood side by side in front of the same house.
They were almost impossible to tell apart.
Same eyes.
Same dark hair.
Same narrow face.
Twins.
And around each woman’s neck hung an emerald pendant.
The maid slowly lifted her eyes.
“The necklaces belonged to them.”
The older woman nodded.
“To us.”
The word landed strangely.
The maid looked at the photograph again, then at the woman standing before her decades later.
“You had a twin sister.”
“Yes.”
“Which one are you?”
The older woman closed her eyes.
The maid understood immediately that this was the question she had been avoiding for years.
When she opened them again, there was no authority left in her expression.
Only fear.
“The necklaces were made for our eighteenth birthday,” she said.
“One for each of us.
Same emeralds.
Same setting.
Same date engraved on the back.”
The maid glanced down at her pendant.
“So why did my parents have one?”
The older woman’s hand tightened around the second necklace.
“They didn’t.”
The maid frowned.
“What?”
“Your father never owned it.”
The maid stepped closer.
“Then my mother did.”
The older woman said nothing.
That silence answered too much.
The maid felt her stomach tighten.
All her life, the story had been simple because no one had given her enough facts to question it.
Her parents were dead.
She had been left in the care of a convent.
The emerald was the only object that had arrived with her.
She had asked the nun for names, photographs, anything.
The nun had always given the same careful answer.
“When the right person tells you, you’ll understand why I couldn’t.”
At the time it had felt cruel.
Now the maid realized the nun had been protecting a secret powerful enough to make an older woman tremble inside her own bedroom.
“Tell me which twin was my mother.”
The older woman reached toward the photograph.
Her finger hovered above the woman on the left.
Then stopped.
“No more games,” the maid said.
The older woman swallowed.
“The woman on the right was my sister.”
The maid waited.
“And the woman on the left?”
The older woman looked directly at her.
“Me.”
The maid stared at the photograph.
The woman on the left wore the necklace now hanging around the maid’s neck.
Her pulse began to pound.
“You said there were two necklaces.”
“There were.”
“And mine was yours.”
“Yes.”
The maid’s voice lowered.
“How did my parents get it?”
The older woman sat heavily on the vanity stool.
“I gave it away.”
“To whom?”
Her answer was almost inaudible.
“To my daughter.”
The maid did
