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CHAPTER ONE

We were made in the dark. I used to hate it when Johnny said that, but now I know it's true.

Sunlight flickered on the windshield as I turned the wheel and the road curved, tightening. Trees pressed in like a wall on both sides of the cracked asphalt, making the old highway that snaked through the Six Rivers National Forest look impossibly narrower. I could feel that cinching in my lungs, too, the air squeezing from them just a little more the deeper into the forest I drove. I'd expected that.

From above, the little blue car would look like an insect between the giant, towering redwoods, and even just imagining it made me uneasy. I'd never liked the feeling that I couldn't see into the distance, like the whole world might have ended on the other side of those trees and I wouldn't know it. I guess, really, it had.

There was no world without Johnny.

The thought made the ache rising in my throat travel down my arms, into the fingers that curled around the smooth leather of the steering wheel. It had been three and a half months since I got the call that my brother was gone, but I'd known at least a day before that. The part of me that wasn't constructed of bone and blood had just...known. Maybe even down to the minute.

I glanced at the duffel bag on the passenger seat, the only luggage I'd brought for the two weeks I'd be in Six Rivers. I couldn't remember now what I'd even packed. In fact, I hadn't even been able to think of what I might need. In the twenty years since I'd seen the tiny, claustrophobic logging town, I'd done my best to forget it. I'd avoided these winding mountain roads, using every excuse I could think of to keep from coming back to this place. But there was no denying that leaving Six Rivers and never looking back had come at a cost.

Only days after I turned eighteen, I left and never returned. I'd spent my youth hidden in the labyrinth-like forest before I'd all but clawed my way out into the light. Now, my life in San Francisco was exactly what I'd made it, as if I'd painted it onto a canvas and conjured it to life. The days that made up that version of me were filled with gallery openings, poetry readings, and cocktail hours—things that made me forget the sun-starved, evergreen-scented life I'd left behind.

But that cost—the unexpected conditions for that disentanglement—wasn't just the home I knew or the memories I'd made there. In the end, the price I'd paid had been giving up Johnny. There was a time when I thought we could never truly be separated, because we weren't just siblings. We were twins. For half of my life, there was nowhere I existed without him, and it didn't feel like we were knit together by only blood and genetics. We were connected in places that no one could see, in ways that I still didn't understand.

There had always been a kind of blur that existed between us. The anecdotal stories about twins portrayed on viral social media posts and afternoon talk shows weren't just entertaining tales that skirted the line of the supernatural. For me, they'd always been real. Sometimes, terrifyingly so.

It wasn't until I left that I felt some semblance of separation from Johnny. In a way, it felt like he had slowly been scraped from the cracks of my life, just like Six Rivers. In the beginning, he would make the trip down to the city on visits that were hardly ever planned. I would come home to find him cooking in my kitchen or standing fully clothed in the shower with a wrench to tighten the dripping faucet. He would just appear out of nowhere before vanishing like a ghost, and he never stayed long. He was a creature of quiet, unnerved by the buzz of the city and the twinkling lights it cast on the bay. The visits became less and less frequent, and he hadn't shown up like that in years now.

Johnny wasn't one for phone calls or emails. Half the time, he didn't even respond to text messages. So, my only window into his quiet life in Northern California was the Instagram account he kept updated. From 349 miles away, the bits I got to see of my brother's existence in the redwoods were through the lens of the old analog camera we'd found sitting on top of a neighbor's garbage can when we were sixteen years old. Twenty years later, he had still refused to switch to digital, and after he started the Instagram account, it soon became filled with those little bits of the world that only Johnny seemed to notice. Sunlight gleaming on dewdrops. A swath of lace-like frost clinging to a pane of glass. The owls.

Always, the owls.