What We Asked For

PROLOGUE: WHAT WE ASKED FOR

The first time I saw her in person, she recoiled.

Not dramatically. No gasp, no scream. But something in her eyes pulled back, like I was a smear on her white carpet.

We were twenty-three. Born minutes apart. Raised worlds away, or at least, that’s what I told myself.

She was Rina Feng, heiress to the Feng Foundation. Flawless in a dove-grey coat, surrounded by handlers and press, handing out scholarships with a smile that never quite reached her eyes.

I had grease on my jeans and a beat-up folder of birth records. Proof that she wasn’t the only daughter born that night, or so the papers said.

“I’m your sister,” I told her.

Her body stilled. The smile froze.

“That’s impossible.”

I showed her the papers.

She didn’t even look.

Security came within seconds.

“Escort her out. She’s confused.”

Confused. That’s what she called it.

It got worse after that.

I followed her online. Watched every speech, every gala. I started hearing her voice in my head, words I couldn’t quite place, letters I never sent.

She had everything.

While I had cracks.

The night I killed her, I wasn’t myself.

Or maybe I was the truest version of myself. The version built from abandonment, from foster homes and broken ribs and cheap apologies.

She opened the door. No handlers this time. Just her. Alone. As if she’d been expecting me.

“You came back,” she said.

Not scared. Just tired.

She stepped aside to let me in.

I stood in her kitchen, looking around at the life I was supposed to have had. My mind went blank. I pulled a knife from the block.

“You were always the lucky one,” I screamed.

I stabbed her. There in the kitchen.

She didn’t scream. She just pressed her hand over mine.

“Was I really that lucky?” she whispered. “Or did you just see what you wanted?”

I didn’t answer.

The help heard. They always heard. Cops came fast. Cameras faster.

The trial was a spectacle.

FENG HEIRESS MURDERED BY SECRET TWIN

JEALOUSY OR MADNESS?

TWO LIVES. ONE FATE.

I was called a monster. A thief. A cautionary tale.

The truth? I was a girl who’d spent her life trying to swap mirrors with someone on the other side of the glass.

And I failed.

Now I lie strapped to a table. Cold steel against warm skin.

They let me hold one thing. A photo of her, of us. Smiling. Identical. Taken before we were separated. Before the world decided which girl got to be wanted.

I close my eyes.

“I wish we could trade places.”

The needle goes in.

The world dissolves into light.

And when it reforms,

I wake up gasping.

In her body.

PART I: RINA

I wake in hell.

The mattress beneath me reeks of mould and old sweat. The ceiling is cracked plaster. No silk sheets. No ambient lighting. Just the low hum of a fridge that sounds like it’s dying.

My hands are wrong.

The nails are chipped. The knuckles scarred.

I stagger to the mirror.

She stares back at me. Gaunt cheeks. Bloodshot eyes. My sister’s face. Or is it my own? I touch my mouth, half-expecting it to disappear.

The room feels familiar in a way I can’t explain. There’s a framed photo on the dresser: two girls. The edges are blurred, as if the faces shift whenever I blink.

“Lia! Rent’s three weeks late! I swear to God,”

I step back, trembling.

There’s a photo on the dresser. Me. Her. Torn in half and taped back together.

She must have looked at it every night.

I drag myself to the kitchen. The sink is piled with dirty dishes. The air smells of damp and stale smoke. A crumpled notebook sits on the counter, its cover worn, pages yellowed.

I flip it open.

Poems. Dark, messy lines about pain and wanting. About a girl trapped behind glass, staring at a life she can’t touch.

I recognise the handwriting.

My handwriting.

Or hers.

I don’t remember writing such words. But some part of me does.

I stumble back to the mattress and sit with the notebook open in my lap, the words bleeding into my chest. Outside, rain hammers the cracked window. Somewhere deep in my memory, two girls play beneath a leaking roof, one laughing, one crying. I can’t work out which one I was.

Maybe both.

How did she live like this? How did I live like this?

PART II: LIA

Everything is too quiet.

The sheets are lavender-scented. The mattress holds me like it knows my name.

I look down at my hands: delicate, polished, unscarred.

I climb out of bed and float through the penthouse like a ghost.

“Miss Feng? Shall I prepare your tea?”

I nod. I think I nod.

At a boardroom breakfast, men in suits hang on my every word. I don’t speak. I don’t know what Rina would say. I only know what I would.

“Is it lonely?” I blurt.

They blink. I excuse myself.

In the mirror above the bathroom sink, I search her eyes for a lie. But there’s nothing there except me. And yet, for just a moment, the reflection seems to flicker. I see my own tired face looking back instead.

That night I find faint bruises on my arms, faint purple lines I don’t remember getting. I press my fingers against them, confused.

At a gala, I overhear two women whispering about the ‘poor sister’ like she’s a ghost story. I feel the sting of a name I can’t claim.

The loneliness is suffocating.

I lie awake wondering if the life I’m living is real, or just another mask.

PART III: CROSSROADS

I find her journals.

Stacks of them, hidden behind silk scarves in a drawer. She wrote about me. About guilt. About lying awake wondering where I was, whether I was alive, whether I hated her.

She knew. She always knew.

But some pages are blank, or smeared as though torn away, like memories I can’t quite grasp.

And then I find her sketchbook.

Drawings of street corners. Hungry girls with steel in their eyes. A scrawled line at the bottom of one page:

I wish I could feel the rain like she does.

I drop the book.

I didn’t kill a stranger.

I killed the only person who ever looked for me.

PART IV: THE MEETING

It comes in a dream. Or maybe something more.

We sit across from each other in a blank room. No walls. No time.

She looks tired. I feel older.

“I hated you,” I say.

“I deserved it,” she says.

“I wanted your life.”

“You can have it.”

Silence.

“Do we get to keep them?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“I think we’re supposed to make something new.”

We sit, back to back.

The dream ends.

But something stays.

PART V: AFTER

She opens a community centre. Names it Lia’s Place.

She teaches poetry to girls who smell like I used to. Girls who flinch when the world gets too loud. She learns how to cook, how to laugh, how to mourn. She keeps a photo of me on the desk.

I leave the penthouse. Sell everything except one violin. I move to a small flat above a bakery. They call me Rina, but I tell them I used to go by another name.

I write articles. Essays. Small things. True things.

I play music at night. Just for me.

EPILOGUE: THE MIRROR SHATTERS

I looked in the mirror.

Two faces stared back.

No. That’s not right. One face. Fractured.

The rich girl. The poor girl. Had it always been like that?

Two halves of a broken whole.

I never had a sister.

Just a thousand pieces of myself.

I killed her.

No. I killed me.

Dissociative identity disorder, the doctor said.

The needle, the trial, the murder. Nothing but pain, twisted into a story I told myself to survive.

But now, I’m ready.

To stop running. To start living.

Because the lives I wanted were never separate.

They were me.

We both asked for different lives.

We didn’t get what we wanted.

But maybe... we got what we needed.