We Switched Places With My Bruised Twin Sister And Made Her Husband’s Life A Living Hell

The Visit at Crestwood State Hospital

My twin sister came to visit me at the hospital covered in bruises all over her body. Realizing she was being abused, I decided to swap my life with hers to teach that monster a lesson he would never forget.

My name is Nia and my sister’s name is Lisa. We are twins, identical as two drops of water, but our destinies were as different as oil and water, as heaven and earth.

People said I wasn’t right, that I was crazy. The doctors used more elegant words; they said I had an impulse control disorder, that I struggled to regulate my emotions.

I describe it as feeling too much. I feel everything ten times more intensely than other people.

My joy can make my chest feel like it’s going to explode. And my anger, well, my anger is what brought me to this place.

When I was sixteen, I broke a kid’s arm with a chair right out on the block. He hadn’t done anything to me; he was just grabbing my sister Lisa by the hair, trying to drag her into a dark alley.

Lisa was just crying and I felt the blood boil in my head. I don’t exactly remember what I did.

I only remember the sound of a bone snapping, the boy’s scream, and the horrified eyes of the people looking at me. They weren’t looking at him; they were looking at me.

They called me a demon. My parents, who were already struggling, started going through the worst; they were scared of me.

Eventually, they brought me here to Crestwood State Hospital. And just like that, ten years went by.

Ten years living in a white room less than one hundred square feet. Ten years seeing the world through a window with iron bars.

Ten years in which my only friends were the medication and the soulless screams of the other patients. But if I’m honest, I don’t dislike this place.

It’s quiet and nobody bothers me. I have time to read and exercise.

For the past ten years, I’ve trained every single day. I did push-ups and pull-ups using the window bars as a bar.

I did sit-ups, anything to burn the energy bubbling inside me. My body was lean but hard as a rock.

The only gift this decade of confinement gave me was physical strength most men on the outside would envy. I had only one pain, one single worry: my sister Lisa.

A Warning Ignored

She inherited all our mother’s kindness and I inherited all our father’s fierceness. She was soft as water, incapable of hurting anyone’s feelings.

The day they took me away, she cried until she ran out of tears. She said. “Nia, it should have been me who left. I’m useless.”

I slapped her, the only time in my life I’ve ever hit her. I said. “If you say that stupid stuff again, I’ll break out and choke you. You have to live. You have to be happy. Live for both of us.”

She promised me she would. The following year she came to see me with a man saying they were getting married.

His name was Darius Rakes. He was handsome and tall, but his gaze wasn’t honest.

His eyes darted around constantly. And when he looked at me, I felt a subtle sense of superiority and contempt.

I gripped my sister’s hand tightly. I said. “I don’t like this man. Think about it again, sister.”

Lisa just smiled sadly. She said. “With my luck, it’s a miracle anyone even wants to marry me. My parents are old and he promised to take good care of me.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to break the glass separating us.

But what could I do? I was the crazy one; what weight could my words possibly hold?

The wedding happened and I couldn’t attend. Lisa came to see me every month.

She always brought a gift, like a box of fruit or some pastries. She talked about her new life.

She bragged about being pregnant. She also talked about her daughter, Sky.

Her voice struggled to sound cheerful, but I’m Nia, her other half. I knew she was lying.

Every time she visited, she was a little thinner. The dark circles under her eyes were darker and her smile was fragile and painfully forced.

She always wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned up to her neck, even in the scorching heat of a July sun. I asked her several times, but she always said a married woman had to dress modestly.

A lie; she was hiding something. Today was visiting day again.

I waited from early morning. The sky outside was gray, just like my heart.

I had a terrible feeling. The rage I’d suppressed for ten years was starting to stir.

It was like a hungry beast crouching, waiting for just one drop of blood to fall. And I knew that today that drop of blood was going to fall.

The Map of Hell

I heard the dry click of the lock and the heavy iron door opened with a screech. The instant Lisa walked in, I felt like someone squeezed my heart.

The person in front of me wasn’t the Lisa I knew. She was just an emaciated, fragile shadow.

She wore an old blouse with worn shoulders and the collar pulled up to her chin. Despite the suffocating summer heat, she was dressed like this.

Her hair was messy, her face sunken and pale. But what chilled my blood were her eyes.

Where were my sister’s clear, sweet eyes now? There were only two deep pits filled with despair, two dead lifeless pupils.

And beneath her left cheekbone, a faint purplish bruise clumsily concealed with cheap drugstore makeup. She forced a smile, a smile that turned my stomach.

She asked. “Nia, how are you doing?”

Her voice was weak and trembling like a dry leaf. She set a basket of bruised oranges on the table, probably cheap ones she’d bought on sale at the market to save money.

I didn’t answer. I walked up and stood firmly in front of her.

I raised my hand and with my callous fingers I gently touched the bruise under her eye. She startled and stepped back like a bird frightened by a bending branch.

She said. “Ah, it’s nothing. I fell off my bike.”

I repeated, my voice ice cold. “You fell off your bike? You fall and only get a bruise on one eye? How do you have to fall for that to happen?”

She stammered, lowered her head, and wrung her hands. I looked at her hands; her knuckles were swollen and red.

Her nails, short and scratched, were these the hands of someone who worked hard or of someone desperately defending herself? The anger began to rise.

I took a deep breath, trying to keep my voice calm. I asked. “I’m asking you, sister, why are you wearing long sleeves in this heat?”

She said. “I don’t like the sun. I’m a little weak lately.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed her wrist.

She let out a little cry and tried to pull away. She said. “Nia, what are you doing? It hurts!”

That it hurts was like adding fuel to the fire. Ignoring her please, I yanked her sleeve up and then I saw it: the map of hell.

My sister’s thin pale arms were covered in bruises: old yellowish bruises, recent dark purple bruises, red and swollen marks. There were circular marks as if she had been tightly squeezed with fingers and long thin marks like from a whip or a belt.

I released her hand. My entire body trembled, not from fear, but from rage—a consuming, demented rage I hadn’t felt in ten years.

I said. “That bastard Darius.”

It wasn’t a question; it was a certainty. Lisa froze.

She stopped hiding it and, as if a dam had broken, she collapsed, covering her face and starting to sob. A long-held cry burst out, a sad bitter weeping that filled the white room.

She cried. “Nia, Nia, save me! Help me!”

She crawled on the floor and clung to my legs. She cried. “He hits me. He hits me constantly. His mother, his sister, that whole family treats me worse than a dog. And he hits Sky too. He hits Sky!”

The Confession

That last sentence turned me to stone. That monster had hit Sky, my three-year-old niece.

I crouched down and lifted her. This time she slumped into my arms, completely drained of strength.

I looked at her tear-swollen face. I looked at those eyes, identical to mine, now filled only with despair.

My voice was deep and raspy. I said. “Stop crying. Crying doesn’t solve anything. Tell me, tell me everything from the beginning to the end. What has that bastard done to you? What has he done to Sky?”

I sat my sister down on my single metal bed. I poured her a glass of water.

She drank between sobs and then she began to speak. Her desperate confession was a death sentence for that family.

Lisa, sitting on the bed with trembling shoulders, shook the glass of water in her hands. With a broken voice that was choking in her throat, she began to speak.

Every word she uttered was like a knife plunging into my heart. Lisa began to recount. “At the beginning of the marriage, he behaved, at least in front of our parents. But when I moved in with them, that’s when I discovered what hell was like.”

Her husband Darius was a gambling addict working as a simple warehouse worker. He earned a miserable wage, but every night he blew it all on sports betting and online casinos.

She sobbed. “He spent all the money from our wedding in three months. When I said something to him, he slapped me. It was the first time.”

He said. “What would you know, woman? It’s my money; I’ll do whatever I want.”

That slap was the start of a habit. If he lost money betting, he hit his wife; if he won, he hit her anyway, claiming it was her fault he hadn’t won more.

I clenched my fists so hard my nails dug into my flesh, but I didn’t feel the pain. My sister trembled. “But the worst part wasn’t Darius; it was his mother, my mother-in-law Mrs. B. A terribly wicked and bossy woman.”

She looked at me like I was a bother, like a thief who’d stolen her son. She tormented me slowly.

If I cooked, she complained it was too salty or too bland, dumping the whole pot into the organic trash and making me start over. Even if I cleaned the house three times, she said it was dirty.

And that woman, that woman forced me to handwash the whole family’s underwear, even my sister-in-law’s. I closed my eyes.

The image of my sweet, timid Lisa crouched down washing those filthy things made me nauseous. I growled. “And the sister-in-law?”

Lisa shook her head. She said. “Trina got divorced, moved back with her son, and lives rent-free in her mother’s house. She treated me like a maid. She left her clothes everywhere and ordered me to wash them. Her son Julian is a spoiled brat. He tormented Sky every single day.”

I opened my eyes abruptly. I asked. “What did he do to Sky?”

Lisa started crying again. She said. “Sky is only three years old, Nia. Julian is five. He took her toys, pushed her, and threw her to the floor. He even spit in her plate of food.”

When I said something, my sister-in-law came running and yelled at me. She asked. “Who do you think you are to scold my son? Your daughter doesn’t even have a father!”

And then she even encouraged her son to hit Sky. Mrs. B just watched and laughed. She said. “They’re just kids. Your daughter is stronger; she has to yield to her cousin.”

I asked, my voice raw. “And Darius, your husband, the child’s father?”

Lisa lowered her head and said in a thread of a voice. She said. “He looked the other way. He said women needed to give birth to sons, that having a daughter was useless and…”

She hesitated. I shouted. “Talk!”

She jumped. She said. “Yesterday, yesterday he came back completely wasted after losing money betting. Sky was crying because Julian was pulling her hair and he… he went crazy.”

He screamed at her. “Shut up, you useless brat!”

When the little girl got scared and cried louder, he… she couldn’t continue talking and put a hand to her cheek.

I whispered, but I felt like someone was strangling me. I said. “He hit Sky in the face.”

Lisa nodded, tears streaming down. She said. “She’s only three years old. She had the mark of five fingers across her face. When I ran to protect her and plead with him, he hit me. He dragged me to the bathroom. He slammed my head against the sink. I thought I was going to die, Nia. I couldn’t breathe.”

She continued. “The bruises on my arms are from the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law. Instead of stopping him when they saw him hitting me, they joined in. Trina scratched me with a comb and Mrs. B grabbed some dirty socks and shoved them in my mouth to shut me up.”