So I rebelled. Went through several foster homes in the first year. Got a bit of a juvenile record and went to counselors. Eventually I realized it took too much energy to always be angry, to always find reasons to hate everything. My current foster family was actually really nice, and though I didn’t see them as my real family, I did feel like I could trust them to treat me well and care if anything happened to me.

Which was more than Jeffery ever got. I had a hundred opportunities to tell people about him, about what had happened to him, and at first I took them. I told the police, I told my case worker, and I even told my first foster mother. It was all met with skepticism, especially the part about the basement, but they agreed someone needed to go check.

But when police went, they could never even find the house, much less some twin there was no record of. This was well before I was placed in foster care, but when I tried one last time to tell Judy, my first foster mother, she just smiled like she understood and said she’d make some calls to see what she could find out. I knew from her expression she’d already heard about them not finding anything when they’d looked before, and it wasn’t much of a surprise when I was back in a state orphanage later that same month.

So I learned to pretend that he didn’t exist. I would tell therapists that I made it up because I was so upset about my parents’ deaths. They didn’t question it any further after their initial due diligence that I wasn’t delusional any more, and over the years it became easier and easier to believe myself. Not that I ever really believed he wasn’t real, but the mind is a very flexible and selfish thing. I found myself thinking about him less and less as I became more adapted to my new “normal” life. My ideas of guilt and loss were slowly being overwritten with new friends and dating and applying to colleges.

And then the other day I took my standard shortcut between my house and my weekend job.  And there he was, murdering that girl, his eyes dark and unreadable as he stared at me. Sitting at the coffee shop, running back through the memory, I realized that while his eyes looked strange and his skin seemed pale and clammy from a distance, he otherwise looked just like me.

His haircut, his light beard, his…his fucking clothes.

He was wearing the same clothes I was.