Thoughts on Character Choices in Twin Promises, #4

SPOILER ALERT

This post discusses events through Part 3 (chapter 50) of Twin Promises.

One of my dearest friends is estranged from her sister. There was no dramatic rupture – no betrayal, no unforgivable act. Just a slow erosion of trust over years, until the relationship that might well have been the closest one in her life became a source of sadness, and eventually a burden she can almost always ignore. She doesn’t talk about it much. When she does, what comes through isn’t anger. It’s bewilderment. She can’t understand how two people who grew up in the same house, shared the same parents, and once knew each other completely ended up as strangers.

I have a large family – plenty of siblings and in-laws – but I’m not anyone’s sister. I have no direct experience of the specific bond between two women who share a childhood. What I have is the image of my friend when she talks about what she doesn’t have, and a fiction writer’s (possibly silly) compulsion to build on the page what life refused to provide her.

Amelie and Katelyn Foster are sisters-before-misters. Born exactly a year apart and raised as twins after Katelyn’s identical twin Kinsey died during labor, they developed a bond so deep that it reorganized everyone around them. By the time you reach the middle of Part 3, you’ve seen the Prologue’s hint that something unusual is happening between the sisters, Amelie negotiating with John on Katelyn’s behalf before the two have even met, and eventually a three-person family structure that only makes sense if you understand that separating Amelie from Katelyn was never a possibility for those two girls.

Do I have any business writing this? I spent a long time wondering. The sisterly bond in Twin Promises isn’t ornamental. If I got it wrong, the entire structure would feel false. So I trained on another story about close sisters and recruited a female literary expert who has an extremely close sister to read specifically for the authenticity of the relationship. Not the plot, not the prose, not the pacing – just the sisters. Does this feel real? Would two women who are this close actually talk this way, fight this way, protect each other this way? The notes I got back were detailed, sometimes corrective, and invaluable. I rewrote several passages because my reader said, gently, that a brother’s guess had shown through.

The due diligence was professional. The motivation was personal. I wrote Amelie and Katelyn because my friend can’t have what they have, and I wanted her to see what that kind of bond looks like when it works, when two sisters choose each other so completely that they build a family around the choice. It meant getting on the page their loyalty, teasing, wordless understanding, and willingness to sacrifice autonomy for proximity. And it meant letting my friend sense the absence in her own life without reminding her it really should hurt, even though she has become used to it.

I shared the manuscript with her when it was ready. I won’t say what she told me. But I will say that there was a moment when the look on her face was worth every hour of research, every correction from my expert reader, and every moment I spent wondering whether a man with one sister, lots of brothers, and oodles of sisters-in-law and nieces had any right to commit to the page two sisters who love each other this fiercely.

Fiction can’t repair a broken relationship. But it can build a window into the one that could have been. Sometimes, for the person standing at that window, seeing what might have been can be a gift – that was the plan, anyway. In the meantime, writing Amelie and Katelyn has been a blast!

Share