When Piyanan was a child, she never spoke alone.

Every word came in twos—"we're hungry," "we're tired," "we're going." She and her twin, Pichai, were halves of the same sound, the same body, the same breath. Even their footsteps seemed to echo in unison, soft against the old wood floors of their grandmother’s house by Nong Han Lake.

Pichai was brilliant. People didn’t just say it—they declared it. Teachers, neighbors, even monks during morning alms. They said his mind was electric, always five steps ahead of the question. “Bangkok will want him,” someone once said. “Cities eat children like that, but they call it feeding.”

Piyanan wasn’t stupid. But in comparison, she was just the background. People called her kind. Quiet. The sort of child who watered plants without being asked. Her grandmother once said Piyanan had an empathic soul. She felt things that weren’t hers to feel. But souls weren’t measured by scholarship.

When they turned ten, the parents returned. They’d been busy in the city, building something sharp and ambitious. They came for Pichai, only him, and spoke about "opportunity" and "potential" as if Piyanan couldn’t hear.

Pichai promised to come back. He did, once. Four years later. That summer ended with sandals on the lakeshore and a silence that spread like algae.

No one saw him falling. The lake gave no answers. Only his absence.

Blame was a thing that began small—tight lips, longer paused. Then it grew legs. Their parents took Piyanan back to Bangkok, but not as a daughter. More like a keepsake they couldn’t look at.

They moved into a pale condominium without balconies, without a view. Piyanan stopped speaking in plurals. Eventually, she stopped speaking much at all.

Years passed the way dust did—slow until it blanketted. Her parents’ deaths came during a company retreat up north. The boat flipped. Another accident. Two more bodies.

Piyanan signed the forms, arranged a modest cremation, and inherited the estate. She didn’t touch the money. Just kept a small, clean life in the corner of the city. Her work—funeral makeup—was quiet. She liked the stillness. The way faces could be softened, almost corrected.

But rumors followed like water stains.

A neighbor’s dog was found drowned in a mop bucket. A coworker slipped in the bath. A florist’s husband died during a beach holiday. People started whispering. That she was cursed. Or worse—that she had done something. Something to her twin. Something to his body.

They said she was using him.

They never said what for.

Then came the day divers found fragments of bone, small cloth threads tangled in reeds, near the lake where it started. They identified Pichai from a tooth. The drownings didn’t stop. But the rumors stopped. For a while.

One morning, without calling, her grandmother arrived.

The funeral home was colder than she'd imagined. Too white. Too bright. She found Piyanan brushing blush onto a girl’s cheeks, the kind of pink you only saw at dawn. The dead girl was young. Peaceful.

“Go wait in my room,” Piyanan said, eyes still on the girl’s face.

The room had no window. Just a fan, a folding bed, and a long mirror on the far wall. Her grandmother sat on the edge of the bed. Waited.

By noon, the whispering began.

The air felt crowded, though no one had entered. Words hummed in the corners like a lullaby half-forgotten by time.

At three, the door clicked. A sound too careful to be casual. Piyanan stepped in—not walked, but poured in, the way water knows how to find the shape it’s meant for.

She stopped in front of the mirror. Her mouth moved. Quiet. Off-key. Not her voice. Not completely. It slipped out slowly, like something waking up from inside a dream that didn’t belong to her.

Then she laughed. Once. Hollow and thin.

Her hair was short. Grown in, not cut—like it had been waiting to match the shape of someone else’s reflection.

She didn’t see her grandmother watching at first. But when she did, her head turned too sharply. The way someone might move in a borrowed body. A small twitch. Then stillness. That deep kind of stillness before a typhoon arrived.

Her shoulders didn’t look like hers.

And in the hush between two heartbeats, her grandmother whispered a name she hadn’t spoken aloud in over a decade.

“…Pichai?”

Later that day, no one saw the old woman leaving the building.

Just the funeral artist standing at the upstairs window, her silhouette framed by afternoon haze. The light caught her eyes—too fixed, too deep—as though she were remembering how to wear someone else’s face.