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Have you ever had a twin? Not a biological twin, necessarily, though that certainly counts. But I mean social twin—a soul mate. No, more than that—a person who knows you inside and out, who can finish your sentences for you, and who you know will love you no matter what happens. Some lucky people may find this creature in their romantic partner but not me. My soul mate has always been my closest friend.

Dorothy was—is—my twin. We wear the same size. We’re two weeks apart in age. We grew up together in Wilder, Vermont, played together just about every day of our childhood, had sleepovers every weekend. We went to separate colleges but called each other every day, and when we graduated, we moved in to the same apartment in West Hartford, Connecticut. All our lives we revealed our crushes, laughed or cried about work and boyfriends, shared all our secrets. All but one, that is. Dorothy kept a secret from me for years, and when she finally told me what it was, about six years ago, it nearly broke my sorry heart.

It was a month before we both were to turn 30. By then I’d been engaged, unengaged, employed, unemployed, had a career in journalism, started writing a syndicated financial column, all while living with Dorothy. She, meanwhile, had gotten her master’s in library science, gone straight into a job as a law librarian, and stayed in it. She was the steady one, with a single exception: When she was 18 and a canoe guide at a summer camp in Maine, she’d fallen in love with another counselor and managed to get herself pregnant. Little Claire now wasn’t so little. She lived with Dorothy’s aunt in Chicago. Dorothy saw her daughter when she could, sent money and birthday presents, but Claire considered “Apply”—Aunt Polly—to be her real mother. But, if anything, Claire’s birth steadied Dorothy even more. Claire was the anchor in all of her life’s storms.

For some years, however, she’d been going on mysterious trips to Washington, D.C.; Westchester County, New York; and San Francisco. I assumed Dorothy was seeing a lover and was embarrassed about it for some reason. An affair with a married man? Someone I used to date? It wasn’t like her to keep it from me, and the secret acted as a very small wedge in our otherwise close relationship. But it was what Dorothy did, and I had no choice but to accept it—though I did tease her whenever she came home, asking about her wandering boyfriend.

Once I joked about her being in some secret government agency, cloak-and-dagger stuff, sworn to secrecy, and she startled me by answering, “You’re getting warmer.”

Really? Was I really on to something? I called her the Librarian Who Came In From the Cold. But I never believed it. I figured it was a ruse de l’amour, a way of throwing me off the scent of her scandalous relationship. She’d surely tell me in time. And while patience isn’t one of my virtues, I’d do anything for Dorothy, even to the point of letting her keep something from me. And then she finally told me.

I had just heated up some lasagna for dinner when Dorothy came home from work. She grabbed a carton of orange juice from the fridge, poured us each a glass, and motioned me toward a chair.

“The lasagna will get cold,” I said.

“It can wait. You need to hear this.”

“You’re getting married!”

“C’mon Anna, don’t be ridiculous. But now I can finally tell you this secret. It’s been killing me, but I really was sworn to secrecy.”

“Wait, you’re with the government?” Did I know this woman?

“No, it’s a new Internet venture. Those were business trips I was taking all these years.”

“Dorothy!” I leaped up to hug her. “I’m so proud of you! Are you going to be rich? Will there be an IPO? And I never in life thought I’d hear you say ‘Internet venture.’ You’re not a ‘venture’ person, at least in the business sense.”

“Will you let me talk? Yes, I am a venture person. It took much longer than any of us anticipated—technical problems, staffing problems, a constant battle for more capital.”

“I thought you were a librarian.”

“I am a librarian. I’m an expert in storing and retrieving information. A guy I met in grad school got me in on the start. They needed a way to categorize stuff. The idea was to provide people with information before they knew they needed it. ‘Information push,’ it’s called.”

“So it’s like those commerce sites, the ones that predict what you’ll like based on what you’ve bought.”

“Sort of, but much more. You’ll have to see it to understand it. We go live in two months.”

“What’s it called?”

“Kyros.”

“Is that Greek?”

“The two main founders are named Kyle and Ross. But ‘kairos’ is Greek for ‘occasion’ or ‘timing.’ Kairos is the art of seizing the moment, of…”

“Now you’re getting all librarian on me.”

“Sorry.” She sat back and sighed. “That’s not all I have to tell you.”

“What?” She was slumped on the couch.

“I’m moving to Cleveland.”

“Oh.” I felt like I’d just been dumped by my first love. I could barely choke out a “I’m so pleased for you, Dorothy,” before I burst into tears.

But the day we left for Cleveland—I was going to get her properly settled—it felt the way it always had: just the two of us, off on an adventure somewhere. We were going to spend a long weekend together, splurging on a good hotel, eating out, being ordinary tourists before the movers came. I needed the carefree time with her. I was traumatized by the sight of our—my—half-empty apartment.

We landed in Cleveland late in the afternoon. The plane banked over Lake Erie as the late sun sent splinters of light in all directions. We could see sailboats on the water.

“Could we rent a boat?” Dorothy asked.

Here’s one way Dorothy and I differ: She’s half amphibian, and I’m a big fan of terra firma. Show Dorothy any human-powered watercraft and she’ll act as if she was born in it. Kayaks, canoes, white-water rafts, sailboats—it didn’t matter what size or shape or whether it was on a frothing river or the deep blue sea; she was comfortable with anything afloat, including herself. She’d spent many summers as a lifeguard at a camp in Maine and was a beautiful swimmer.

On land, Dorothy is just a little awkward. She looks the part of a stereotypical librarian: glasses, wiry hair typically pulled back in a ponytail, clothing that favors the practical over the stylish—tweed or corduroy pants, white blouses, and an alarmingly broad selection of cardigan sweaters. Now, very, very few librarians actually dress like that, but all it takes is one Dorothy to perpetuate the image.

I remember a few years ago she and I were watching the DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life, and when we came to the part where Donna Reed in a Jimmy Stewartless alternative world ends up as a—horrors!—librarian, Dorothy glared at the screen. “I hate this part!” she said. “When she’s a wife raising three kids in an enormous house, she’s beautiful with every hair in place, wearing pretty dresses and pearls. When she’s an independent career woman, for some strange reason that ruins her posture, her taste in clothing, and even her eyesight—look at those glasses!”

“You wear glasses,” I said.

“Not like those.”

“Actually, a lot like those.”

“Anyway, that’s not the point. Did people actually believe that a woman who never married would just shrivel up?”

“In those days they had spinsters,” I said. “Thankfully, that term doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Otherwise, we’d be spinsters,” she said.

“We’re not old enough.”

“Oh, yeah? Reed was 25 when they filmed that movie, three years younger than we are now,” she said triumphantly.

That’s another thing about Dorothy: She would pull the oddest facts out of nowhere. She seemed to know everything, and I had learned at an early age not to ask how she knew these things. She just did.

But I got sidetracked. I was talking about Dorothy’s awkwardness on land. She’s like a loon: On water, she’s lithe and graceful. She was the top swimmer in our rec center team in middle school. But she’s even better underwater. She can hold her breath.…

I’m sorry. It’s been six years since Dorothy moved away. I miss her so much. That time we spent in Cleveland, I smiled with a lump in my throat. What would I do without my twin?

I was Donna Reed in this story. I felt lessened by Dorothy’s impending absence, as if something buoyant and light had been removed from my very being. I had a sinking feeling over that long weekend, a feeling that I was literally sinking. Who knew that platonic love can break your heart?

What made it worse was Dorothy’s excitement over the move and the launch of her “venture.” I felt abandoned, even while I was still in Cleveland with her.

I suppose I overcompensated that first night. We went to the Warehouse District, where the best bars and nightclubs are. I drank a lot, or so Dorothy told me. Apparently, I danced a lot, too. I have a hazy memory of bangers and mash at the Great Lakes Brewing Company. After that it’s a blank. I woke up feeling like my head had been run over. It had been years since I’d drunk like that.

Dorothy nursed me back to life with coffee, and then hustled me into the shower to get dressed. We had to hurry to meet Aunt Polly at the Museum of Art. We showed up at exactly 11 a.m., and true to form, Polly was already there.

Dorothy and Polly had been through some rough patches—they both wanted to be Claire’s mother—and it was my idea to invite her to Cleveland. With Claire grown up and off to boarding school, it was time for a reconciliation.

We spent the whole day museum hopping, from the art museum to the Great Lakes Science Center to—briefly—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (We only had time for a quick look at Dickey Betts’ Gibson Les Paul electric guitar; Betts played with the Allman Brothers, Polly’s favorite band from college. And I made the others run with me to see Janis Joplin’s psychedelic Porsche before the museum closed for the day.) It was the perfect sort of day for it: a warm, misty rain fell, lowering a sort of transparent scrim before the city and making the museums seem almost cozy.

Polly and I had never visited Cleveland before, and we were struck by the city’s unexpected beauty. It had long since lived down its image as the city beside filthy Lake Erie—everyone knows the lake today is clean enough for swimming—but I couldn’t help being influence by that Randy Newman song about the soup of pollutants in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River that caught fire. It looked clean enough to me, and you can walk along parts of it and see the city’s lights reflected in the water at night.

We ate dinner at a mercifully early hour. Polly, who looks young for 45, wore a dress to dinner—a stunning long black dress. Her curly red hair had an artfully tousled look, and she was wearing an expansive lapis and gold necklace that, she said dismissively, “some guy” had given her. I raised my eyebrows at Dorothy; in the past 18 years I had known Polly, I had never, ever heard her mention a man. The saying was true: The times, they are a-changin’. I even hummed a few bars of the Dylan tune to myself.

We took a cab from the hotel back to the Warehouse District and walked into the Blue Point Grille at exactly 6. We were among the first diners to be seated, and it was quiet in the nautical-themed dining room. We ordered drinks—a ginger ale for me—and when they came, Polly lifted her glass: “To change,” she said. “To change,” Dorothy and I repeated. It took all the enthusiasm I could muster to say it with apparent conviction.

“So, Polly,” Dorothy said. “What are you planning to do now that Claire is in school?” Dorothy gave a little smile, and I could tell that she was dying to ask about the boyfriend.

“Oh, I’ll keep teaching,” she said. Polly was a substitute teacher in a school district outside Chicago. “But I inherited a little money, and with you paying Claire’s tuition, I’m going to travel a bit.”

I looked at Dorothy in surprise. “You’re paying all of Claire’s tuition?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You saved that much money on your librarian’s salary?”

“No,” she said. “I really didn’t save much of anything.”

“So where’s the money coming from?”

Dorothy leaned forward conspiratorially and whispered, “The venture. We’re now owned by a huge corporation. I’m not allowed to say which. Besides an absurdly large salary, there’s my share of the company, which is—well, let’s just say Claire won’t ever hurt for money.”

“Our very own Dorothy is a wealthy entrepreneur,” Polly said.

“Well, not wealthy, exactly.”

“How much is not wealthy?” I asked. “Just out of curiosity. Low six figures? Low seven figures?” After all, finance was my new beat.

“One does not discuss such things at dinner,” she said primly, though the corners of her mouth betrayed a smile.

“Well, shut my mouth,” I said. Was I feeling just a tiny bit mad? I suppose I was. Not about the money—OK, a little about the money. But more about all the secrecy, the suddenness of the move, and I suppose I felt a loss of stature. The competitive side of me had made me feel just a tiny bit—I’ll admit it—superior to the two other women. My readership was already in the high six figures. I was the successful one. And now—

“You’re not jealous, are you, Birdie?”

I laughed a little louder than I’d intended. “You owe me money, dear,” I said archly. “I’m your creditor.”

“For what? Oh, you mean what I owe you for my half of the leather reading chair? I can write a check right now if you like.”

“I’m teasing you, Dorothy,” I said, “and don’t you dare ever pay me back. I like having a millionaire owe me money.”

“Don’t exaggerate. I’m not a millionaire. Except perhaps on paper,” she added, mumbling into her menu.

I let that comment pass.

Dinner was spectacular; the lobster mashed potatoes should be declared a national treasure. We talked about the museums, art, and why people collect art. It seemed that everything we talked about led us back to the subject of wealth.

“Know that song, ‘If I had a million dollars,’ by—who was it?” I asked.

“Barenaked Ladies,” Dorothy said.

“Right. Remember how that song ends. ‘If I had a million dollars—I’d be rich,’” I crooned.

Dorothy frowned. “You know, all this talk about money makes me more than a little uncomfortable.”

“Let me finish first,” I said, pointing my fork at Dorothy. “In one of those books about how to simplify your life, I read that after imagining what you’d do with a million dollars, you should also ask yourself whether you could still accomplish those goals without the million.”

“So it’s an exercise to determine what you really want,” Polly said.

“Right. People wait for their ship to come in, and then it never does. Present company excepted—sorry, sorry!” I said quickly when Dorothy opened her mouth to protest. “Anyway, we wait and hope for our own dreams to come true, when those dreams were right in front of us, achievable. It’s supposed to teach you that everything is within your grasp if you’ll just reach for it. See, Dorothy?”

She just smiled at me.

“So what would you do with a million dollars?” Polly asked, looking at me.

“That’s the point. I’d be a newspaper columnist. Maybe I’d dabble in writing fiction and maybe do a little painting. But I could also achieve that just by cutting back on television. You, Polly?”

“I’d teach, and I’d travel,” she said.

“Which you’re doing anyway.”

We both looked at Dorothy, and I could almost feel a miasma of awkwardness settle over the table.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t actually have a million dollars, so I can dream with the rest of you. I’d be doing this amazing thing with information storage and retrieval—what I’m doing now, in other words. I’d set up a trust fund for Claire—which I’m also doing. I’d give 10 percent to the Children’s Fund—which I intend to do. And,” she said quickly, her face reddening, “I’d buy a Porsche Boxster S with a 3.2-liter engine.”

“You didn’t!”

She nodded, looking down at the table as her mouth gradually grew a smile.

“What—”

“Red,” she said before I could finish the question. “I ordered it a couple of weeks ago. It’ll be at the dealership tomorrow, and I’ll pick you up in it at 10 a.m.,” she said to me.

“Are we going to cruise up and down the street? It’ll be just like high school. Except we never did that. I guess because neither of us had a car, huh?”

“No, we’re going sailing,” she said. “I found a boat through the Cleveland Sailing Center. All we’ll have to do is close our eyes, and we can pretend that we’re back home, spending a lazy summer afternoon out on the Connecticut.”

“Oh, goody,” I said wryly. “Another afternoon in a boat. Gee, I can hardly wait. You know how much I adore the water.” I rolled my eyes. Typical Dorothy.

Dorothy arose at “oh-dark-hundred,” as she liked to call the wee hours, while I slept in. My alarm woke me at 9, and I showered and dressed quickly so I could hunt down some strong coffee. I bought some stylish sunglasses at the hotel’s store.

At two minutes after 10, Dorothy and her red Boxster pulled up with the top down. Two bellmen raced to be first to open her door. “No, thanks,” she said. “I’m picking up my friend.”

The bellmen looked at me with open admiration. Funny. For years, I’d laughed at men who assumed that a nice car would somehow transform me into iron filings for their babe magnet. It never occurred to me that a woman’s car could magnetize men. But then, I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.

“I brought you something,” I said, handing her the sunglasses.

“What are these for?” she asked, turning them over in her hands.

“People tend to wear them on their face,” I said.

“You know what I mean. Have you noticed the sunglasses already on my face? They’re prescription. Which these are not, right?”

“You have to get contacts. The owner of a car like this can’t wear glasses. I’m sure it’s in the manual somewhere.”

She reached over and stuck the sunglasses in the glove compartment; then she shifted, and we lurched into gear. “Thank you, Birdie. I’m so glad to have you as my stylist. Even though those glasses won’t last a week before I lose them in the lake.”

This was probably true. A great many bodies of water harbored a collection of Dorothy’s former sunglasses. She could chain them to her head with a padlock, and she’d still manage to lose them.

We drove at a moderate, un-Boxsterlike pace through the uncrowded city streets to the Whiskey Island Marina. The boat was ready for us, moored some 50 feet from the dock, sails up, flapping in the breeze.

“What kind of sailboat is that?”

“A Laser,” Dorothy answered. “It’s basically a two-person boat with a mainsail and a jib. A great training boat, really easy to maneuver.”

I nodded, as if I knew what she was talking about.

We bought food and water from the marina store, picked up our life vests and map, and received safety instructions from a sandy-haired boy who looked young enough to have had his mother drive him to work. We used a little rowboat to get us out to the Laser. Dorothy expertly tied the rowboat to the mooring and stepped into the sailboat. “Watch your head getting in,” she said. “The boom can really fool you.”

“How, exactly, can it fool you?” I asked as I pulled the two boats together and prepared to join Dorothy. Just then a gust of wind blew into the sail and the horizontal bar at the bottom—the boom, apparently—came within a few inches of knocking me senseless. “Right,” I said, trying not to look shaken. “The boom.” I slithered into the sailboat, keeping my head down. “Do I sit in the back?” I asked hopefully. At least there I could keep an eye on that boom.

“No, I’ll sit in the stern,” she said with a slight pedantic emphasis on stern. “That’s where the tiller happens to be. You sit farther forward,” pointing to a spot on the right—starboard.

“What should I do, Captain?” I asked.

“You don’t have to do anything” she said, “unless we start heeling too much. Then you’ll need to get out on the gunwale to stiffen her.”

“I’m sure when the times comes you’ll say that in some human language,” I said.

She just smiled. Then we got out the suntan lotion and slathered it on, checked the rigging (actually, she did the checking), made sure all was “shipshape, Bristol fashion”—she had a fondness for nautical fiction—and then she said, “Here’s one thing you can do. Untie us from the mooring.”

I crawled up to the boat and examined the knot.

“Don’t untie our end! Pull us up to the mooring.”

“Oh, great,” I said. Now I had to deconstruct a knot while leaning precariously out of the boat. I looked at that knot with despair; it looked like something that would stump Houdini—when Dorothy said, “What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” I shouted, “is that I don’t have a degree in knot-tying!”

“I think that end has a carabiner on it—a clip. Just unclip it.”

“Then why,” I said, leaning out still farther and grabbing the carabiner, “did you tell me to untie us?” I held the rope with one hand and pressed the lever on the clip. The thing released immediately, and the boat began drifting sideways. I pulled the rope in, coiled it as best I could—creating a nest that would embarrass a rat—and wormed my way back to my post. Dorothy hauled on a rope, grabbed the wooden tiller, and we shot between two other moored boats into the open bay. The water made a musical rush and slosh against the hull. As we got out into the open water, the boat began to tilt at an acute angle. I looked at Dorothy in alarm. She was looking off into the distance with a squinty grin.

“Dorothy?” I shouted. “Dorothy!”

“What?”

“ARE WE GOING TO TIP OVER?”

She responded by steering a little into the wind. The boat lost some of its terrifying cant.

“You’ve been making it do that?” I couldn’t believe Dorothy. It wasn’t like her to scare somebody like that.

“Sure,” she said. “It makes us go faster. If you want, sit out on the edge. Your weight will decrease the angle a little and make us go even faster.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“OK, OK. Jeez, what a lubber you turned out to be,” she said cheerfully, loosening the rope—or sheet, as she insisted on calling it. The boat slowed to a speed that allowed my heart to return to near normal.

We sailed for about two hours, and then Dorothy “put us about,” turning the boat to “beat up into the wind.”

“It’ll probably grow calmer later in the afternoon, and I want to gain the weather gauge,” she said.

“Oh, yes. What would we do without the weather gauge. What on earth is a weather gauge?”

“Well, basically, the term just means getting upwind.”

The wind did die down a little past 3, but we could already see the dock about a mile ahead.

“Mind the boom,” Dorothy said. “I’m going to tack.”

I ducked, and the sail swung over me to the other side.

“Want to steer?”

“Er, OK,” I said.

She read my lack of enthusiasm. “Come on Birdie, it’ll be fun.”

I crept to where she sat. She made way for me and placed my hand on the tiller. “Just keep it like that,” she said. “Now take the sheet,” placing the rope in my other hand. It slipped through my fingers, and the sail began flapping loudly. “Haul it in!” she shouted as she took her place on the left—port—side. So I hauled as best I could, and the boat began to lean. When I finally had everything under control, I didn’t mind so much. I steered for half an hour or so while Dorothy sat on the very edge, her feet hooked into something in the boat, her face tilted up into the wind, ponytail streaming like the red telltale on the tip of the mast.

Dorothy was a pure waterbird, completely in her element, and the lump in my throat grew bigger. I’d had messy breakups with men, the usual little tragedies of the dating life, but I had never felt as lonely as I did at that moment, rushing over the water of Lake Erie with the tiller in my hand, moving farther and farther from shore.

Dorothy took over, turned the boat around again, and we were on the dock at precisely 5 o’clock, without a single mishap—except for when I failed to catch the mooring, causing Dorothy to execute some frantic maneuvers. We went straight to dinner at the marina, sitting over the water and watching the sun set. We ate without saying much.

“I’m not abandoning you,” Dorothy said. I avoided her gaze. I knew that just looking at her, and thinking about all those years now coming to a close, would make me cry. It seemed better to keep my gaze focused on the water outside. I could barely see anything in the darkness, but that didn’t matter.

“We’ll talk every day, OK, Birdie? Everything will be fine. Really.” She covered my hand with her own. “You’re my other half. Always have been.”

I finally turned to her. Dorothy’s face had grown stoical; it does that when she’s trying not to cry herself.

“I know it will,” I said. “You’re doing exactly the right thing. I’m proud of you.”

“You said that already,” she said with a forced smile.

“Well, I am.”

The waiter brought the bill, and I handed him my credit card before Dorothy could produce hers. “I don’t want you lording it over me, Ms. Bigshot,” I said, trying to sound grand. “I can still afford to take you to dinner.” I signed the bill with a flourish and stood up. “Let’s go back to the hotel. I have something for you back in the room.”

I was grateful that Dorothy didn’t ask me what it was. Unlike her, I was terrible at keeping secrets. For our entire lives, she’d known every birthday and Christmas present I was giving her, weeks before the actual occasion arrived.

We stepped out of the restaurant, and I linked my arm through hers.

That night I gave her a canoe paddle. I’d had it expressed to the hotel from Connecticut. It was an old thing that Dorothy herself had pulled from Grafton Pond, her favorite lake, lost or left behind by some other canoeist. It had taken me weeks to paint. I’d covered it with symbols of New England, our home: Mount Cardigan, a leaping bass, a cluster of wild blueberries. On the handle, a bright night sky twinkling with the Big Dipper. On one side of the blade, a loon drifting on the water, gazing with its crimson eye at the viewer.

“Oh, Anna, it’s beautiful!”

“Look closely at the loon’s tail,” I said, pointing at the feathers.

She peered at the blade. I had painted her name into the pattern.

“You think I’m loony for doing this,” she said. “For moving halfway across the country, don’t you?”

“No. I think you’re you.”

And she hugged me, knowing exactly what I meant.

The next two days were almost a relief—the move sapped our energy, and as we worked together, so familiar with each other’s ways that we rarely had to speak, I almost fooled myself into thinking I was moving with her. But on Wednesday morning, I got up at 5 and slipped out of her apartment while she was still sleeping, curled around her pillow in a tight little ball. I had packed the night before and told her that my flight was two hours later than it was. That way she couldn’t drive me to the airport, and we wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

Anna McKee is the pen name of a novelist living in New Hampshire.