Chapter 2The Body She Left Me

I had a sister, Stella, three years older than me.

I was six when she died. Mom and Dad came home late that night, their faces hollowed out by grief. Mom saw me, crumpled to the floor, and pulled me into a suffocating hug. “Stella’s gone, sweetie,” she choked out. “Chloe, you don’t have a sister anymore.”

I didn’t understand, but her grief was contagious, and I started to cry, too. Through my tears, I pointed to a pile of dolls in the corner. “But she’s right there.”

At first, they didn’t believe me. They scolded me for making things up, for being cruel. But then I started repeating conversations they’d had in private, whispered behind their bedroom door. They accused me of eavesdropping, but over time, they realized I couldn't have heard. They finally accepted the truth.

I wasn’t lying. Stella was always there, a shimmering outline only I could see. She slept in her old room, walked to school with me, and told me everything our parents said. She knew she was dead.

But when I told other people, they looked at me like I was broken. “The Millers?” I heard a neighbor whisper once. “Such a shame. One daughter dead, the other one crazy.” Friends at school called me a liar, an attention-seeker. They’d play with me on the playground, then I’d hear them laughing about me behind the slide.

Stella would fly at them in a rage, but she was only a ghost. The most she could do was make them sneeze.

Eventually, I stopped talking about her to anyone but my parents.

At home, life went on, a strange new normal. They got used to me speaking for her, a living telephone to the dead. They couldn’t see her, but they would buy two of everything—one for me, one for the ghost of their other daughter. No distance, not even death, could stop them from loving her. I was their bridge, the translator for their grief.

Then, on my sixteenth birthday, she vanished. I couldn’t see her anymore. At the same time, I lost two days. One moment it was Tuesday, the next it was Thursday.

Mom and Dad explained it to me later. Stella had woken up. Inside me. The two days I couldn’t remember were the days she had been living in my body.

After that, it became a regular thing. I’d go to sleep and wake up days later, with no memory of what had happened. We shared a life, documented in a spiral-bound notebook, leaving notes for each other about where we’d been and who we’d seen.

We lived like that for three years.

I never imagined that in just three years, my parents would decide she was worth more than me.