“Take me back…take me back…take me back…”

  I sob the words over and over and over again as Gideon holds me close. He doesn’t speak to me or rub my back or offer any comfort other than the sanctuary of his body. And since I would fall if he wasn’t holding me up, I stop fighting and lean, limp and exhausted, against him.

  He is still and strong. Quiet and present.

  I have no idea for how long I rail and weep and sob, but when I’m finished, he loosens his grip, takes my hand, and leads me back over to the van. As soon as I’m settled in the seat behind his, he closes the sliding door and rounds the van to the driver’s side.

  As he’s sitting down, his phone rings.

  “Gideon here. Hey, Tom.” There’s a long pause. “Yeah. Okay. Mm-hm. Yeah, Sven Olausson. Gotcha. This afternoon…or…? Right. Tomorrow morning. Yep. Gotcha. Thanks again, Tom.”

  He doesn’t catch my eyes in the rearview mirror when he says, “State troopers have already authorized the rescue. Pass should be clear by tomorrow morning, and no more snow is forecasted for tomorrow. They’ll send a team in then.”

  “Tomorrow,” I murmur. “No! No, no, no. Today! Why not today?”

  “It takes time to mobilize a rescue party. National Guardsmen from the 210th and 212th will be down here tomorrow. The ground is too risky for a landing. They’ll have to airlift the bod—I mean, uh, Howard and your brother and the other guys—out of there.”

  “W-Wait! You were…you were about to say the—the…bodies,” I gasp. “That’s what you were about to say.”

  He cringes. “That was the language Tom used, yes.”

  “But…what if they’re…alive?”

  “I don’t…” His eyes catch mine in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry, Addison. I know this isn’t what you were hoping for—”

  “Shut up!” I yell.

  “—but maybe you should prepare yourself for—”

  “SHUT UP!” I scream.

  I know it’s true. I know my brother is almost certainly dead.

  Dead.

  Oh, my God. Elliot.

  And that’s when I feel it—or realize it—for the first time: my twintuition is…gone.

  Like sitting in a room and realizing over time—as it gets hotter and hotter—that at some point, someone turned off the air conditioning. Someone flicked a switch. Someone turned it off. And it’s only later, when the heat’s making you sweat, that you realize it’s probably been gone for a while.

  The invisible cord that bound me to my twin brother…

  It’s…gone.

  “I can’t feel my brother,” I murmur aloud, ice running through my veins. “I can’t feel him anymore.”

  My brother is dead.

  The thought knocks the breath from my lungs, and I struggle to inhale. When I finally do, it’s raspy and jagged.

  “Why don’t you come back to my house?” Gideon suggests. “You don’t sound good.”

  “N-No.” My eyes slide to his in the rearview mirror. “No. I’m…fine.”

  “You’re not. I’m worried about you.”

  Fuck you.

  I don’t care if you’re worried about me. I don’t want to go back to your house, where I was happy for a few stupid hours yesterday while my brother was dying.

  “Addison?”

  My brother is dead.

  Elliot is gone.

  I can’t bear to be around Gideon anymore. I can’t bear to be around anyone. I need to get away. I need to be alone.

  “No. I’m not…I just…” I close my eyes and lean my forehead on the window to my left. “Take me to the hotel.”

  “Okay,” he says softly.

  Ten minutes later, Gideon pulls into a parking space, then hops out of the driver’s side and rounds the van to open my door. I don’t take his proffered hand. I barely look at him when I hand him the business card I’ve fished out of my wallet.

  “Please forward your banking information to my assistant, Kitty. She’ll see to it that you’re paid the thirty thousand we agreed on.”

  “Wait. What? Can we—”

  “Thank you for your help,” I say, looking past him, through him.

  “Addy—”

  “Addison!” I yell, nailing him with my eyes and fisting my hands by my sides.

  I’m furious with him. I’m furious at the whole world, and it’s like a hot, roiling, living thing inside of me, consuming me, burning me up from the inside out. I am made of anger and nothing else.

  He winces. “Addison, please. Come home with me…or let me stay with you. You shouldn’t be alone. You shouldn’t—”

  “My assistant’s number and e-mail are on the card.”

  “Addison, can we just—”

  “No!” I bellow, my voice firm and final.

  I hate you. I hate the whole world. I’d burn Alaska to the ground if I could.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t take you back up, but I didn’t want you to see—”

  “I don’t care,” I tell him. It’s true. I don’t care about anything. Nothing. The world can go to hell for all I care. I’m numb.

  My brother is dead. Maybe I’m dead too.

  “I care about you, Addison,” he tells me.

  Something inside of me pinches for a millisecond, then passes. His words and the sentiment behind them, don’t matter. Nothing matters anymore.

  “I don’t care,” I say again, stepping around him without a second glance.

  I walk through the automatic doors and into the lobby. Crossing the lobby, I head to the elevator, press the call button, and wait for the door to open. When I step inside and the door closes, I have a sudden and brutal flashback to my childhood.

  Elliot and I are crouched in a closet together, as far back in the corner as we can manage, our bodies tangled together, much as they were in the womb, our little hearts beating like drums.

  Our mother and her new boyfriend scream at each other in the next room.

  Last night, he burned Elliot with a cigarette because El touched the flashlight on his keychain.

  It still hurts. I know it.

  “He’s gonna find us, El.”

  “He’ll find me first, Addy,” he whispers close to my ear. “I’m closer to the door. Now shut up.”

  Something made of glass is thrown and shatters against a wall, and my mother screams the f-word, and the boyfriend yells that he’s going to kill her.

  “Is he really gonna kill her?” I ask my brother.

  “Maybe,” he says, his little arms holding me closer.

  “Then we can live with Gramma,” I whisper.

  “No, Addy. Don’t say that.” He loosens his arms. “I have to help her.”

  “No!” I cry. “No. Don’t leave me, El.”

  “I’M GONNA KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING BITCH.”

  “She’s all we have!” he says.

  I grasp for him, but he’s too quick for me, sliding out of my reach, slipping from the closet door, and leaving me alone in darkness.

  She’s not all we have, I think, pulling my knees up to my chest and wrapping my arms tightly around them. We have each other.

  The elevator dings to tell me I’ve arrived at the second floor, and I stumble onto the Navajo-print carpeting. Staggering to my room, I somehow make it through the door and to the toilet before throwing up the meager contents of my stomach.

  “El-li-ott,” I sob, with puke and saliva hanging in strings from my lips. “Oh, God. Oh, God. El-li-ott!”

  I rest my head on the toilet seat and weep for so long, crying my brother’s name, it’s dark by the time I leave the bathroom and fall into bed without changing. I curl up into fetal position, but tears stream from my eyes when I consider that I was never in actual fetal position alone. I shared that sacred space with someone who is now gone.

  I dry my eyes with a corner of the sheet, but they still leak tears, like a snotty nose that can’t stop running.

  My brother is dead.

  Tomorrow I will collect his body and arrange to have it shipped back to Los Angeles, where I will bury him.

  And I will never, ever return to this godforsaken corner of creation again.

  Not for as long as I live.

  Chapter 7

  Addison

  Grief is a fluid thing.

  Not dead. Not alive. But constantly with you, moving and morphing into terrible shapes and forms that you can’t anticipate, that you don’t know how to handle and that you can’t figure out until you’re assaulted by them. And while you sometimes stay in a certain shape or form of grief for days, the terrible twist of grief is that you might just as likely be thrown from one form to another over the course of hours. Without warning or time for preparation, you will go from detached to furious to heartbroken, with only the whiplash of your emotions clueing you in to the fact that your grief is moving.

  It’s like a bubble sometimes, keeping you at arm’s length from the rest of the world. You move around the earth, treading ground that should be familiar to you, but you are no longer familiar to it. You are a changed entity altogether, and you can never go back to what or who you were before. You are an alien life-form to the life that is—that was—yours.

  Other times it’s so in-your-face, so suffocating, you can barely stand it. It’s like a rash that won’t stop itching, an infection that won’t stop pussing, a buzzing sound in your ears that you can’t escape no matter how loud you turn up the music or scream.

  And then there are times that it covers you like fog, like mist, deceptively gentle, yet totally blinding. You can’t see where you’ve come from. You can’t see two inches in front of you. You have no idea where you’re going.

  What I’ve learned most of all is that it doesn’t really matter what form grief takes.

  In all of its forms, it’s exhausting.

  It’s hard to keep living.

  And sooner or later, it feels like everything is falling apart.

  Though the timelines in my life have become blurry, I know the day my life started falling apart because it was the same day that Sven Olausson found Howard Greene’s aqua snowcat. Sven Olausson. And Howard Greene. Two men. Two names I’d never heard before I traveled to Alaska. Two men whose names are burned onto my brain. Two men who changed the course of my life forever.

  The day after Sven Olausson found Howard Greene’s snowcat, the bodies of five men were airlifted from the deep crevasse at the south end of Deserted Glacier into which they’d fallen and been trapped. Another man—a sixth man—was found about two miles away, buck naked, curled up in a snow cave he’d dug for himself with his bare hands.

  Kieran Flanders.

  He survived…

  …but lost all of his fingers, all of his toes, most of his ears and his nose to frostbite in the bargain.

  Elliot and the others didn’t make it at all.

  When the cat fell into the crevasse, Howard and two of the guys closest to the front died on impact, leaving three left alive. Elliot’s legs were broken, and Stewart Flanders, a younger brother of Kieran, was knocked out cold. Elliot and Kieran tried to keep Stewart warm, but he died the following day of internal hemorrhaging.

  Since Elliot couldn’t walk, Kieran climbed out of the crevasse to try to find help, but he lost his way in Thursday’s storm. He fell down another crevasse, breaking one of his legs and spraining the ankle of the other. He managed to climb back out by Friday afternoon, but by Saturday morning, he was so delirious, he shucked off his clothes to “cool off.” Apparently, this is not unusual among victims of hypothermia. They take off their clothes, dig caves in the snow, and curl up to die. He would have died, too, if the rescue team hadn’t realized he was missing from the group and found him late on Saturday morning.

  Miracles happen, said Tom from the Valdez PD.

  Just not for Elliot.

  Stuck in a snowcat, deep in a crevasse, with four dead bodies and two broken legs, my twin brother died of blood loss followed by hypothermia. He froze to death next to Stewart, whom he was holding like a twin in a shared fetal position—forehead to forehead, nose to nose—when they found him.

  These are the facts.

  These are the facts that keep me awake all night and haunt me all day long.

  These are the facts that circled in my brain when I should have been researching court precedents and when I started canceling high-profile client meetings.

  These are the facts I tried to silence with shots, then glasses, then bottles.

  These are the facts that kept me awake all night, making me so tired by morning, I couldn’t get to work on time, couldn’t focus on what I was supposed to be doing, didn’t see it coming when my partners, Greg and Bob, asked me to take a leave of absence.

  Maybe it was the scotch, or maybe it was the all-consuming fury and heartbreak that still simmered within me, but I told them to go fuck themselves, that I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Then I fucked up an easy settlement in February and another in March, which resulted in a malpractice suit.

  And after that, Greg and Bob didn’t ask, they insisted…by way of a vote of incompetence. They forced my resignation in April and bought out my share of the practice. They said they were sorry, but their hands were tied.

  By that time, I didn’t much care.

  About anything.

  Three months to the day that my brother was pulled dead from that icy crevasse outside of Valdez, I wake up on the floor of my bedroom, congealed vomit under my cheek and an empty bottle of scotch on its side at eye level. Joining the smell of puke, as I force myself to sit up, is a strong whiff of urine. I pissed myself again. Honestly, I really couldn’t care less, except that it stings the skin on my thighs.

  I shuck off my clothing as I stumble toward the bathroom, turning on a hot shower and resting my forehead against the tile wall as I let the water beat down on my naked body. My head aches, and my mouth waters. What I want—what I need—is a drink. That will help the throbbing in my head and the relentless thoughts of my brother’s lonesome death.

  I wash the puke from my hair and face. I let the water wake me up a little, soap down my thighs and rinse them, then turn off the water and pad back into my bedroom. The clothes I wore last night are soiled, so I pull leggings and a T-shirt from my bureau. Luckily, my maid service keeps me in clean clothes. I’ll call them to scrub the piss and throw-up off my rug later today. I certainly don’t have the energy to deal with it.

  Buzz. Buzz buzz. Buzz. Buzz buzz.

  When the door buzzer to my apartment sounds, it actually makes me jump. I only hear it when I order takeout. But it’s one o’clock on a Tuesday and I just woke up. I didn’t order anything.

  I head from my bedroom into the hallway that leads to the front door, squinting at the bright light filtering in from my study and dining room. When I get the front vestibule, the buzzer sounds again and I yell, “Who is it?”

  “Uh…Ms. DeWitt?” The voice is muffled and unfamiliar.

  “Yeah,” I call back. “What do you want?”

  “My name is, uh…Kieran? Kieran Flanders? I, uh, I wanted to, uh…to talk to you?”

  My fingers, fisted by my side in irritation of this interruption, unfurl. I freeze where I am standing. Kieran Flanders, whom I have never met in person, who survived the accident my brother did not, is standing in the hallway outside my door.

  I don’t know what to do.

  I need a drink.

  I need a drink, but he’s standing there, waiting for me to answer the door.

  Do I want to talk to him? What does he want? Why is he here?

  It’s Elliot’s voice in my head that says, You won’t know unless you open the door, Addy.

  On wobbly legs, I step to the front door, holding my breath as I unchain and unbolt the door. On the other side stands Kieran Flanders, his face misshapen and the stumps of his hands still covered in gloves made of snow-white gauze.

  “Ms. DeWitt?” he asks me, tilting his head to the side.

  The shell of his ear is gone, I note, but his nose has received some plastic surgery—they’ve replaced a big chunk of it with a piece of skin from somewhere else.

  “Yes.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze sweeps over me, taking in my damp, limp hair and grubby clothes, but there’s no judgment in his expression when his eyes reconnect with mine. No judgment, but maybe a touch of sympathy, which makes me bristle.

  “May I come in?” he asks, his voice soft and gentle.

  No. “Why?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Elliot.”

  Elliot. Hearing his name is like a blow.

  I blink at Kieran Flanders for a moment before taking two steps back and opening the door for him. He limps as he enters. That’s right. No toes.

  “Um…we can…talk in my study,” I say, leading the way through the foyer, down a short hallway, and through the first door on the left. It boasts a knockout view of Los Angeles, and I used to love it.

  “Wow,” says Kieran Flanders, nodding in appreciation.

  “Take a seat,” I say, gesturing to one of the two chrome and white leather chairs in front of my glass desk. I sit in the black leather chair behind the desk, stiff and uncomfortable, and fold my hands on the black leather blotter that covers the glass surface. I glance at the bottle of Jack Daniels on the bookshelf. “Do you want a drink?”

  “No,” he answers.

  To my surprise, neither do I. Or rather, I do, but I can wait. Right this minute, I’m more curious about what Kieran Flanders has to say than getting up and pouring a drink.

  “You must be…surprised,” he says. “To see me, I mean.”

  “I don’t know why you’re here,” I say softly.

  He nods at me, his eyes heavy and sad, like he’s seen things in his twenty-four years that no one has any business seeing. Or that no one should see and then survive.

  “We both lost brothers,” he says simply.

  I flinch, sliding my hands back and folding my arms over my chest. I stare at him, saying nothing. You survived. You survived. Why did you survive when Elliot didn’t?