At the time, I thought we’d lost each other.
Stupid as it sounds, I felt the same thing when those men let me go and I was thrown out of that van. I never go a day without feeling grateful. I was grateful then, but at the same time, it was another rejection. It’s fucked up, but I convinced myself they’d wanted Zoe instead of me, just like everyone else. And afterward, I felt like I’d almost died because I hadn’t developed my own looks or personality. I started drinking too much, I stopped sleeping, and I just wanted to overwrite this shit thing inside my head with something I actually wanted. I wanted Andrew. I saw the way he looked at me, and I thought, Why not? Why shouldn’t I have something for myself for a change? And somehow, in all that, it became important that he call me Zoe. There was a part of me that had always wondered about being her: would things feel different, feel better? I thought if I could make myself look enough like her and sound enough like her and be enough like her, then it might feel like we weren’t doing anything wrong. Maybe it would solve all my problems? Obviously, it didn’t. Afterward, I think we both felt horrible, Andrew and me. Then as we were getting dressed, Alex walked in on us. She’d told me she was out for the day. The flat was meant to be empty. We froze.
SAM LIMMOND:
I didn’t see the story when it broke, but someone pointed it out to me a few days later. It made sense of what Al said at the time, about walking in on them doing something. She’d thought Zoe was acting strange, and she came away thinking that Andrew was abusing her or something. I guess it was actually just Kim shitting it, thinking they’d both been rumbled.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Andrew saved my life. He put his arm around my shoulder and pretended I was Zoe. I was dressed like her and just about held it together for a few minutes until we could get out of there. Alex was no idiot, she could see something was wrong. I was walking on eggshells for days after, but either she never knew or she never said anything.
The final part of my confession is that I didn’t tell Andrew I’d filmed us together. I knew it could never happen again, so if it worked, if it made me feel good, I wanted to be able to relive it. And I wanted to know once and for all if I really was so different from my sister or if it was all in my head. When I did watch the video back, I hated the person on the screen, I hated myself, and it was probably the next day that I cut all my hair off and dyed it black. I realized I needed to let all this second-best shit go and become my own thing. In a fucked-up, roundabout way, it really helped me come through one of the worst times of my life.
And then I forgot about it—I mean, I actively forced myself to forget about it. Andrew and me weren’t making eyes at each other, and we were never texting or meeting or passing notes. That video was just a file on my computer, one I sent to the recycle bin on the same day it was created. Then one night a month or something later, I walked back into the tower and found out someone had stolen it, leaked it. I never knew who, but when I heard Zoe had seen the tape and then stormed off to the roof, I was terrified.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
How do I respond to Liu Wai essentially saying that this means we murdered Zoe? I don’t know—how can you refute such well-argued points of view? Why is Liu Wai even involved with your book at this stage? Is this like the epilogue of an eighties movie where you show what happened to all the minor characters afterward? Because I’m not sure anyone gives a shit. My response to Liu Wai is that I’m clearly not some master criminal in all this. The first thing I even knew about a recording was Zoe showing it to me, then scratching my face off. I didn’t know where it had come from. For a second, I didn’t even twig why she was so upset. And I couldn’t even speak to Kim about it, because everything went so rapidly to shit afterward. The whole world was getting a good look at me one minute, then we were being evacuated from the building the next. Then they were telling me Zoe was on the roof, the building was burning down, Kim was running back inside, et cetera, et cetera. I couldn’t even speak to her until she’d given a statement to the police.
She was standing in the dark, right at the edge of Owens Park, crying into her hands, saying it was all her fault. I tried to comfort her, told her that Zoe and I weren’t that serious, we were on the outs. You know, I knew it wasn’t ideal, but I was saying Zoe’s tough, she’ll bounce back from this. And that’s when Kim broke down and told me about that night at Fifth, those disgusting fuckboys who’d forced her into a van against her will. She told me about where they’d dumped her, this building site, and that they must have thought she was Zoe, that they must have come back for the right twin. I said we should speak to the police, but one look at Kim told me she couldn’t. So I suggested we just go out there and search for ourselves, set her mind to rest. I helped her get over the fence and waited while she was inside. Next thing I knew, she was being carried out.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
My worst fear from that moment on was that people would find out it was us in the recording, and I knew they would because of the state of Andrew’s face. The only conclusion anyone could come to after seeing those scratch marks was that Zoe had attacked him for leaking it, that she’d meant to send him that message: How could you do this to me?
I knew people would think he was the reason she’d gone missing, and I knew he’d talk to save his own skin, because why wouldn’t he? So once I was back in the tower the next morning, when I was going up in the lift with Fintan, I texted Andrew, telling him I’d go to the police.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
I’d just lost my own family, so I knew what it felt like. I didn’t want Kim to go through that. If telling the world would have made a difference, if I’d thought it would have helped find Zoe, I would have done it. As it was, the only thing we would have accomplished is making my life easier and ruining Kim’s.
KIMBERLY NOLAN:
Andrew said he didn’t think it was a good idea. He said we both knew we had nothing to do with her disappearance, so we’d just be distracting the police if we told them about us. He said his family would take care of him, he’d be fine, I should do whatever made my life easier. I was surprised that he came through for me like that. It wasn’t really like him.
ANDREW FLOWERS:
Kim was someone who’d been sad and broken and momentarily reckless. Was that something worth destroying her life over? I decided that whatever came down the pike, I could bear it myself. It was probably the only decent thing I ever did in my life.