“The key?” I hold out my hand, wondering whether it’s his only copy. The floorboards moan as he crosses to me. Two keys dangle next to the pocket flashlight of the key ring—one, a regular aluminum kind similar to my own house key in my suitcase; the other, three inches of metal, almost an inch wide at the base, that looks like it was forged in a blacksmith’s shed circa 1562. Like it once belonged to a jailer.

He hesitates above my open palm, then steps back. “Do you know what this note reads?”

I flinch. “Note?”

He shrugs toward the whiteboard beside me. “I have never seen her draw that way before. It was here when I came looking after she disappeared. I have been trying to figure it out for weeks. There seems to be some kind of pattern.”

My teeth catch my lip. “She used to doodle a lot as a kid.”

“Doodle?”

“Draw, I mean. Since we haven’t spoken in a few years, you might have a better guess than me.” I turn and close the shutters halfway, my attempt at subtlety—Goodbye, Seb. I turn back. “When were you here last, before she disappeared?”

His gaze shifts to over my shoulder. A child screams laughter somewhere beneath us, the sound fading into high-pitched giggles. After another beat, he places the keys in my hand. “Maybe a few days prior. The note could have been there then, only I did not notice it. Enjoy your nap, Shayna. Welcome to—” He stops himself with an abrupt noise. “Well, I am glad we met.”

I lean against the windowsill, watching him leave. The door closes. My breathing stutters to a gasp.

ALIVE. TRUST NO ONE.

As kids on the beach, we made up our own language by inserting a nonsense syllable after each vowel. In the third grade, we took the idea one step further and started writing it down, inserting the symbol for pi—two vertical bars with a squiggly line on top—as the nonsense syllable. When both of us became interested in mythology in the fifth grade, we translated the letters into Greek and wrote them backward and upside down. Accents and semicolons were added to each top horizontal line to confuse the casual viewer, a form of insurance. No one else knew our secret code. No one else could’ve duplicated it.

She is alive. My twin is alive.

My chest buckles, punching the air from my lungs. Faltering, half-formed breaths struggle for depth.