I’m rattled and angry and disappointed in myself. When we get home Nua and I shower to get the pink off of us, and after mine I sit on my bed. Nua leans against the doorframe to the bathroom, rubbing his hair with a towel. “You okay?”

“Miss Lilly did that,” I say quietly, and he raises his eyebrows. “Did what?”

“Ava told her we were going to the city, that we were going to a library. Miss Lilly got them to hide all the recent newspapers, so I wouldn’t be able to figure anything out about Abigala.”

Nua sighs, crossing his arms. “You don’t know that.”

“Is it impossible?”

He looks at me for a second, and then answers. “No.”

I don’t respond.

“Why did you think she would be in the newspapers, anyway?”

“Because it’s what she always wanted,” I say, lying down on my bed. “She always wanted to do something, like what my parents did, but more. More public. And with me gone and my parents in jail, probably, I thought she would have maybe spoken out.”

“Lilly wouldn’t’ve bothered to hide the papers if there was nothing to hide,” says Nua quietly, and I nod, exhaling. “And even if it wasn’t her specifically, we could’ve found anything out. Anything other than what Miss Lilly or Ava only let us know here.”

“Do you think she was part of those protests?” asks Nua, coming in to sit on his bed, and I shrug. “Maybe. But like Keol said, those have been going on for a while, and they seemed pretty organized. I don’t know if she would have joined something like that.”

“What would she have done?”

“She’s a really good writer,” I say with a sigh. “She’s worked with newspapers before, it helped get us money. She liked to interview people, and they had her shadow a professional reporter and help with the articles. She probably could’ve gotten an article of her own in there somewhere. That’s what she wanted to do, anyway.”

“Interesting,” says Nua under his breath. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Aber.”

“I just wanna know if she’s okay,” I say quietly. Nua smiles sadly and nods, but doesn’t answer.

I don’t get much sleep that night. After dinner I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling without blinking until my eyes burn, and then I realize I have to pee. It’s late, and Nua is asleep, and I sneak into the bathroom as quietly as I can.

As I wash my hands and dry them, though, I hear soft voices coming from Ava’s room. A light glows under the door, and I move closer to it, wringing my hands on the towel.

“I saw him,” I hear Keol say quietly. Ava scoffs. “You don’t even know what he looks like, how do you know you saw him?”

“Because he looks exactly like you,” answers Keol. “He’s your-”

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Twin, I finish in my head, but Keol doesn’t say it; Ava’s pressed her hand over his mouth before he can. Her eyes flash. “Don’t talk about him.”

He slowly places his hands on her shoulders, and she moves away from him, taking her hand with her. He catches it, though, and gently pulls her back and sits her on the bed. He kneels in front of her. “Ava.”

She doesn’t say anything, but closes her eyes. He continues, “Do you want him to be dead?”

She winces, a tear running down her cheek, and Keol takes her hands. “So why are you refusing to accept that he isn’t?”

“I’m not,” she says, her voice low, and her eyes fly open. “I’m refusing to accept false hope.”

He stares up at her for a moment, then says softly, “I know what I saw.”

“No, you don’t,” she shoots back, standing up and forcing him to fall backwards. He catches himself on his hands, then pulls himself up to his feet. Ava glares at him. “I hate you.”

“And I you,” he says softly, tilting his head at her. “Miss Ava.”

“Get out of my room,” she says quietly, and he grins at her, gently touching her cheek. “Really?”

She grabs his wrist and throws his hand back at him, her gaze cutting right through him. “Don’t disobey me.”

He doesn’t say anything, just raises his hands in slight defense, and backs away. Ava grabs her cigarette package off the table next to her bed and as she moves towards the window she lights one, ignoring the fact that Keol hasn’t left yet, but is standing by the doorway, as if waiting for something. When he sees her exhale, though, he sighs quietly and turns to go. Then she says, “Wait.”

“Ava,” he says quietly.

“Keol.”

“Ava-”

“Don’t,” she says quietly, her voice breaking, and he moves back to her side and sits on the windowsill so he’s looking at her face. He touches her cheek again, this time bringing a tear away on his thumb. “I know.”

“You don’t,” she whispers, and he laughs, then coughs as her smoky breath hits him. She swallows, then goes back to the table and crushes out the cigarette. She gestures for him to sit down on the bed, and he does, then moves over so she can too. She waits for him to throw the covers back, and then gets in, fully dressed. Keol throws the covers back over her, and she curls up in a ball facing away from him. “Don’t touch me.”

He doesn’t respond, propping himself up on his elbow to look down at her, and after that, it’s quiet.

I go back to my room. That’s something that’s been racing through my mind all day, too. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Ava has a twin brother. Nua couldn’t be lying, Keol just confirmed it for me. It explains so much. Penny, I remember Sloan saying to Bayan in the dead of night, I didn’t know who Penny was, but now I do, her brother. That’s who misses her and Bayan, that’s why everyone implored me to talk to Ava about Abigala, because she would understand, they knew that she would help, she gets it better than anyone could. I did think I was the only twin in the house, it was a fair assumption on my part, I think. But I’m a twin married to a twin, and both of us don’t know where our other halves are.

Ava has a twin. A twin brother. Miss Lilly probably gave him away. Oh, Ava. My heart clenches for her and for her brother. I can’t imagine what she must have felt when she found out. I wonder what Abigala felt when she found out I was gone. Maybe she doesn’t even know I’m married; maybe she’s been ripping through shelters trying to find me, not knowing that I’m stuck here at this beautiful beach house prison, with a woman who wants to protect me because she knows firsthand what the world can do to people.

He’d only be twenty, too. He’s not past his time, if twenty-five is the age when males are rendered useless. I think about the person standing on the front steps of the library, who asked Nua and I who our wife was when we tried to leave. He was older, an older man, middle-aged. He probably had a decent wife, one who let him go after he got too old or who let him get a job. Or maybe he was married to the rude woman at the desk and she took him to work with her and told him what to do. The woman didn’t want to interact with us, she only wanted us to talk through our wife. The man was prepared to not let us into or out of the the library without identification and proof that our wife was with us. We really can’t do anything, can we. I could do so much more than most boys, though, because I have Ava; if not for Miss Lilly. She’s evil and it cancels out Ava’s good.

Ava has a twin.

Ava has a twin, Ava has a twin, Ava has a twin. Everyone knew about this twin except me. I wonder what his name is. I wonder where he is, if he’s safe, and then I sigh to myself, knowing Ava is wondering the exact same thing.

The next morning, she comes into our bedroom and shows us a picture on her laptop. The paint splatters had been happening all over the city, strategically. The people on the ground marked the spots to get the pattern just right, and the people on the roofs threw the capsules that exploded when they hit the ground and splashed color everywhere. None of the protesters were caught or even identified. A bird’s-eye photo of the city was taken before the cleanup. The protesters used the streets as a canvas, and painted across the entire city, in huge multi-colored letters, the word FREEDOM.