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“I’m sorry,” I say.

She shakes her head. “That’s not why I’m telling you this. That night, I had this moment where I just…panicked. I thought that someone was right behind me and that I was going to get caught and my life would be over. And I realized then that if I went to prison, it was you I was going to miss most. Just the little moments, you know, the two of us hanging out, talking. Mom and Dad were in their own worlds, but you were always there next to me. You may have been the reason I was there in the first place, but it was still you I was going to miss.” Her voice fades. “What I’m saying is, there’s nothing you could ever do that would make me stop loving you. You’re my sister.”

Tears stream down my cheeks and into my mouth. It is unfathomable to me that I could be lovable after everything I’ve done, but perhaps that’s what she’s trying to say, that sisterhood is knowingsomeone fully and loving them anyway. “Thank you.” It isn’t enough. Nothing will ever be enough.

I look up to the sky, to the stars peeking out beyond the canopy of trees. It’s time to ask my last question.

“Can I stay with you after this? I mean, like, live with you? I know I’ll have to start over, to disappear like you did, and maybe you’ll want to start over too, move to another city, get a new name. But I was thinking we could do it together this time. I…I don’t know. What do you think?”

Kasey hesitates. “What about your life back home?”

I think of everything I have back in Mishawaka: a dad who’s lost in denial, a dead-end job with a boss I used to love and now hate, a crappy apartment, no friends, no pets. I have nothing to go back to but a criminal record and legal red tape. I will tell Kasey all of it someday soon. But for now, I just say, “I’d rather start over with you.”

She studies my face. “We can’t do it right away. I need you to go back home after this and act like everything’s normal. Just for a while. Just till we know no one is missing Jenna.”

The idea makes me unbearably sad. I’ll be missing her, at least.

“But eventually,” Kasey continues, “if you want to come join me—”

“I do.”

“Then…yeah. If that’s what you want.” She smiles and it looks sad, but there’s something else there too, something brighter.

We tuck all the stones we’ve found into Jenna’s pockets, her shoes, her bra. Then, together, Kasey and I roll her corpse into the water. For one sickening moment, I think she’s not going to sink, but then the swamp gurgles around her and sucks her down. Soon, all I can see are the strands of her hair disappearing into the black. If I didn’t know what it was, I might think it was nothing more than underwater grass.

I know we are not in the same exact spot Kasey put Jules’s body all those years ago, but I can’t stop the image that swims into my mind: Jenna’s body settling beside her sister’s at the bottom of theswamp, their ghostly hands floating side by side. It makes me think of that poem some stranger wrote in a card all those years ago:

Two branches of the same tree,

two pieces of a soul.

Where one sister goes, the other will be,

for she is but half of the whole.

I look to Kasey, and the two of us begin to retrace our steps back to the truck. Both sets of sisters reunited at last.

I’m just not sure the right ones survived.