“Mercy,” the old woman whispered, the crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes multiplying as she squinted at me. It was a wonder that a woman of her age could manage with so little light in the house.

When I turned to switch on the floor lamp, the woman stood quickly.

“No, no. You’ll upset her.”

She approached and recommenced her squinting, sweeping away the hair that framed my face and holding it back on my forehead with her palm. Now she could see me uninterrupted. She was not our mother, so something felt strange about the way she studied me. She was a hired nurse at best—though it would confirm my worst fears about Dolores’s state if she needed one—and I couldn’t imagine why she should look at me as though through a lifetime of memories.

“You’ve known her for some time?” I asked.

“Long enough to know she must have once looked like you.” She held the awed expression for a moment and then—as though she finally saw me—it flickered out. “You shouldn’t be here. Mr. Lyman ought to know better.”

I had no chance to answer before my own voice interrupted.

“Emma?”

I swallowed as if doing so might confirm that the question had not come from me.

“Emma!” Dolores sang, sitting up now, her hand outstretched in my direction, her fingers splayed as though she was desperate to reach me; yet she did not stand. “Oh, you’re all right!”

As soon as my fingers touched hers, they weaved themselves together. Tears rushed to blur my vision but they didn’t fall. Whether I had always dreamed of it or whether it was a new sensation, now I longed to be held in her arms—but when I sat next to her, Dolores curled into mine. I smelled the lavender she was still using to cover the smell of the straightening chemicals in her finger-waved hair, and I marveled at the way it felt like mine. Not just similarly, but precisely. When I ran my hand over the hair that darkness could not dull, the sensation was devastating. At first too familiar to register any feeling at all, it was as though I was touching my own. And then a flood of overstimulation, an untranslatable reckoning of our exactness and our separation. An ache because we were one. A flurry of excitement because we were not.

“Who is Emma, Dolores?” I asked her. “Who am I?”

“Look at you,” she answered, drawing back with a smile. “Who else could you be?”

When she cradled my bob, she did not sense what I was. Nothing—not my face or my skin or the sound of my voice—could inform Dolores that I’d once been a piece of her. Neither did our sameness grant me any insight into what she had become.