Her face is twisted in thought and finally she sighs, setting the knife aside.

“What is it?” I ask her.

She glances up at me almost guiltily, and then back at her fingers fidgeting in her lap. “You love Elias.” She says it as a statement, not a question.

My eyes go wide I’m so surprised. I look at her carefully, wondering how she would even know to ask such a thing. I can’t figure out what emotion’s in her voice. If she’s angry or hurt or sad or confused or amused. I can’t tell at all what she’s feeling and it frustrates me because we’re twins. We’re supposed to know each other almost better than ourselves.

“He was a brother to me,” I murmur—a safe response. “Of course I love him.”

“That’s not what I mean, Annah,” she says. That same tone. It stirs a memory of when we were kids, how she was always more serious about things than I was. I wonder if that’s still true.

“You love him the same way I do now,” she says. I can tell she feels awkward asking but even so she sets her jaw, waiting for the answer and not apologizing for the question.

I don’t respond. My first instinct is to shout at her that there’s no way she can love him like I did. That I know him so much more than she does. I grew up with him. I survived the Forest with him. I’ve lived with him since we were children, barely alive and struggling to figure out this world with no help. I’ve stayed up all night with him on the roof counting stars.

I know him better than he knows himself, and she can never be the same to him as I am. As I was.

But I don’t say anything. Because I realize that these are things I used to feel. They’re more of a habit now, born of so many years of waiting for him to come home. Of once thinking I needed him to be safe.

I’m not sure I understand what love is anymore. Seeing the way my sister and Elias are around each other, I’m starting to realize that it’s so much more—so much deeper—than what I expected.

“Did he know you loved him?” she asks.

I think about the night before he left. Of him skimming his fingers over my body. He had to have known then.

I shrug.

She leans her head back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling soaring above. “He talked about you with such … fervor in his voice. He was desperate to find you,” she says.

I can’t help but snort, especially since I now know that wasn’t the case. That he’d stayed on with the Recruiters rather than come home to me.