SCARRED - Part 3 (The SCARRED Series - Book 3) by Kylie Walker Page A

duplicate of you, had lived your life.
    There were photos on a shelf on the other side of the bed. Framed memories of her sister that she would never know. Chloe walked over and looked at them. They ranged from when Sarah was probably about four or five until adulthood. There was one of her and Derek there with her parents, the same one Chloe had seen that morning on the yacht. She reached up and took one down from the middle. It was a picture of Sarah in a cheerleading uniform in an antique silver frame. The teenaged girl in the photo was smiling broadly and if one were to guess, she didn’t have a care in the world.
    Her long blonde hair was tied up in a bow at the back of her neck and the look in her eyes was pure confidence. She looked happy, something that Chloe probably never looked at that age. Chloe found herself suddenly cursing her luck and wishing that she had been the one. As soon as she thought it she realized with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach what that would have meant. She was wishing that her sister had to endure Tom and Jesse. With a trembling hand, she sat the picture back where she’d gotten it from and before she left the room she whispered, “I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean it. I just wish that I could have known you.”
    She made her way back out to the veranda and was greeted by three pairs of anxious eyes. She smiled at them all to put them at ease, but she wasn’t ready to sit back down just yet. They politely went on with their conversation as she walked over to the edge of the patio and looked out at the peaceful surroundings. She really loved it out here. It was like being on the other side of the world. She would like to live in a place like this someday. It would be a nice place to raise children. That thought reminded her why she was here.   She should have been raised here. She felt a swell of anger in her chest. She was cheated out of so much and thrust into a world of nightmares...for what? So that some greedy man could line his pockets with cash. Who was that callous over a human life? She tucked that thought away as she began to feel the tears well up once again. She didn’t want to cry again. She didn’t want to have to explain why. She started to turn back towards the others when a glint of something on the hillside caught her eye. She stood and looked in that direction for several seconds. Nothing seemed to be glinting now, or moving. She was just being paranoid. The thoughts of Jesse never went away.
    “You okay?” She heard Derek’s voice behind her and she turned around, “glint” forgotten.
    “I’m good,” she told him.
    He took her hand and led her back to the table. Samantha had taken out the book with all of the mementos she’d save during her pregnancy. She found an ultrasound picture that she didn’t even realize she still had. It had been done at five months when they suspected multiple births. The babies looked like two little dark peanuts. The photos then were much less detailed than they are today. They didn’t actually even look human, but to a parent...or the other half of a set of twins, it was an amazing sight.
    She laid it down in front of Chloe and said, “This is the only picture I have of the two of you together.”
    Chloe picked it up and looked at it with a smile on her lips, with more tears in her eyes. She wanted the tears to stop, but she was sure there would be much more where those had come from. “We were beautiful,” she said.
    Samantha got up and hugged her again and once more, they cried together. They eventually went into the kitchen and Chloe helped Samantha make dinner. That was nice. No tears for either one of them. It almost felt real to her then. While they cooked, Samantha asked her more about what kind of teacher she wanted to be and what grades she would like to teach. She told her that she had an aunt who was a teacher and had been for over thirty years. When she talked about other relatives she’d say,