Chapter One — Two Halves of the Same Whole
Vera and I were born eleven minutes apart, and for the first twenty-four years of our lives, I don't think either of us ever fully experienced the world as a truly separate, individual person. We shared a room until we left for college, developed our own private language as toddlers that took our parents nearly a year to fully decode, and maintained, throughout our entire childhood and into early adulthood, exactly the kind of intuitive, wordless connection that people assume all twins share but that, in our specific case, genuinely lived up to every cliché.
I want to describe, before recounting everything that eventually unfolded, exactly how central Vera was to my own sense of identity, because understanding that centrality matters enormously to understanding both the specific devastation of losing her and the overwhelming, disorienting shock of that phone call ten years later. We'd chosen the same undergraduate university specifically to remain close, roomed together for our first two years before finally, tentatively testing separate living arrangements our junior year, and had built, by our mid-twenties, genuinely independent adult lives that nonetheless remained deeply, constantly intertwined through daily calls and an easy, comfortable closeness neither of us had ever needed to work particularly hard to maintain.
