Claire set down her tea and went over to inspect the pile of mail, hoping to find her results. Most of it was junk – advertisements, a flyer for pizza, and coupons. Nothing from the DNA company.

There was one letter that stuck out. It had her address hand-written onto it. There was no return address, and no name.

How odd. She tore the envelope open and pulled out the paper inside. As she unfolded it, something fell out and onto the floor.

Claire frowned and knelt down to pick it up. It was a Polaroid picture, face side down. She turned it in her hand and gasped.

It was a picture of her holding a baby, seemingly from many years ago. She flipped it over and back again, looking for a date or description, but there was nothing. She stared at the face in the picture for a moment before realizing that it wasn’t her, but her twin sister Rebecca.

Claire sat down on the couch, almost missing the cushion, as her heart rate picked up.

No, there was no mistaking it. It was absolutely her twin sister. Whose baby was that? Becca had never had a baby, and she’d died in the plane crash, too. She was the reason that her family was in that plane in the first place, to pick her up from a rehab facility in the mountains.

Prior to the rehab visit, Becca had been missing for over a year. She’d gone completely off the grid, and more than once they’d worried that she was dead.

Claire shook her head. She remembered that frantic phone call from Becca, saying that she was going to run off and none of them would ever see her again unless they took her out of that place immediately.

“Tell Mom and Dad they’ve got twenty-four hours, or I’m gone forever.”

Becca was always putting pressure on their parents like that. It had annoyed Claire to no end. She was home on spring break from law school, and after relaying the threat, she freely told her parents her opinion on the matter. “You should stop giving in to her. If she wants to run away, let her run away.”

“We can’t lose her, Claire,” her mom said sternly before making a call to Claire’s older sister Holly. Her husband Rob was a pilot at an airline, and he had a friend with a small single-engine plane. He had offered to fly them all down there to talk Becca out of her tantrum…

And so it went. The weather was bad, the plane had mechanical issues, and they crashed. The girls had lost their parents and their grandparents in one moment, all in the name of saving Becca a final time.