God alone knows what they're hiding," Amy said with hysteria, and Mabel realized that her sister wasn't just being paranoid like she had earlier assumed.
"S*it!" Amy cursed as she fumbled with the doorknob and tried kicking the door open.
"Let me," Mabel said in a low voice as she removed one of her hair pins and used it to open the door. The happiness on Amy's face was priceless, but when she got inside the room, she was lost in thoughts.
She didn't even know where to start looking.
"I'll check here, and you check that other drawer. Don't forget how things are arranged. We can't have them suspecting us," Amy told Mabel, who nodded, and the duo got down to work.
Mabel was putting down envelope after envelope on the floor when her eyes landed on one written confidential.
She turned to look at Amy, and with trembling hands and a fast-beating heart, she slowly opened the envelope.
Her eyes scanned through the contents and widened in shock.
"Amy!" She called in a low, exhausted, and frail voice, and Amy swiftly left all before her and rushed to Mabel. She snatched the birth notification paper from Mabel's hands and quickly scanned the contents.
She recognized Marina and Raymond's names but didn't recognize the name of the child Annie.
"Annie! Who the hell is Annie?" Amy cursed as she turned to look at Mabel, perhaps expecting some explanation from her sister, who was still shocked beyond words.
Mabel shrugged and held her head as she looked down in despair. She felt her heart become heavy with pain and coughed and wheezed painfully.
She wanted to talk, but her brain couldn't even form one proper sentence.
She was feeling cold and hot at the same time, and it suddenly felt like she couldn't even breathe properly.
"This doesn't make any sense. Do we have another sibling called Annie? Where is she? Why won't mum and dad ever mention anything about her?" Amy asked in shock as she looked at the birth notification document again carefully, perhaps expecting to unread something.
"Hold on!" She shouted as her eyes almost popped out of their sockets. She was fixed on the spot where the hospital and date of birth were written.
She slowly got down to Mabel's level on the floor and showed it to her.
"What!" Mabel asked in a low voice as she squinted her eyes, rubbed them, and tried to read the document again.
"It's the same hospital I was born in. This Annie is not only our sister. Look at the date of birth. She is my twin!" Amy said, more to herself than to Mabel, who hadn't wrapped her mind around any of what was going on.
"Twin!" Mabel said dreamily. She was always so obsessed and fascinated with stories about twins and had always wished she had a twin.
She enjoyed how people couldn't easily identify twins and how twins shared a close bond.
Hell, she had even contemplated looking for a partner with the genes of twins to increase her chances of giving birth to a set of twins.
"That's exactly what this document shows," Amy said angrily, but Mabel was inwardly wondering whether Annie and Amy were identical twins.
"Mmh, what else is there? Is there anything that can lead us to where Annie is? Is she alive or dead?" Amy asked with a lot of curiosity, but Mabel shook her head and said in a low, almost inaudible voice, "There's nothing other than our birth notifications."
"Oh, God! This is so insane. I can't f*cking believe it. This is not even what I expected to find here," Amy cursed as she looked around the room, wondering silently what other things were hidden therein.
"We need to keep looking," Amy suggested, but Mabel shook her head in devastation.
"I can't. I can't just dig deeper. This is so much for me to bear," she said in a breaking voice, and as Amy looked at her compassionately, she broke into a loud hysterical cry.
"I know…maybe they have just reasons for doing this, but I just don't seem to want to understand. I feel like the love and respect I have had for them have drastically gone down, and it might never go up again. This is so…" she went on, her breaking voice reducing in volume with each sentence said.
"Evil," Amy completed her sentence for her and moved to hug her tightly.
"But I somehow feel so rejuvenated after finding out this. Do you want to accompany me somewhere tomorrow morning? It might help us calm down," Amy asked her sister, who sheepishly smiled and nodded.