I take out the green peppers, the cilantro, the onions, and the chiles, which add lots of heat. Mom’s mason jar of seasoning is in the pantry, and I grab that, too. I run my fingers along the antique spice jars lined up on a small shelf to the left of the stove. Little white ceramic pots with the name of the seasoning written on them in blue paint. Coriander. Paprika. Oregano. They’d been passed down from my grandmother to my mom. The jars were a present from my pappoús to my yia-yia after he got his first paycheck in America.

I have a horrible thought, one I try to get rid of as soon as it comes into my head: If Mom is gone, really gone, Hannah will get the jars. Because she is connected to the line of Karalis women in a way I will never be. Mom would say that’s ridiculous, that I am as much a Karalis as Hannah, but I’m not. Put my blood under a microscope and you’ll see that we’re the same species, and that’s where our similarities end. I don’t have those telltale Greek purple circles under my eyes and black-as-deep-space hair like Hannah does. I don’t have ouzo in my blood.

My hair is haystack blond, and my hips are just two bony protrusions, and when we’re on the beach, I burn instantly while they just lie there, turning bronze, like perfect plates of saganaki.

“Stop,” I say to myself, out loud, because out loud feels four-dimensional.

I scrub the peppers clean, then set them on the cutting board. I turn off the Tallis Scholars, too. I begin to chop, and the sound of the knife against the wood is a lullaby. It’s Einstein’s bow on the strings.

For so long it didn’t matter, not a ton, that I didn’t come from my mother’s womb. Now it does. I can’t shake it, this little voice that keeps whispering they don’t belong to you—they never did. If I had one wish, it would be to have the same genes as the rest of my family, to share the same blood. To look at old black-and-white photos in the green leather album in the living room and see myself in all the faces. Hannah and I have been treated like twins for as long as I can remember, because my parents got me when we were both three. We have always been the girls. Lila, can you pick the girls up from school today? Greg, the girls need some lunch money—do you have any cash?