“Thank God we found this abandoned cabin! I didn't want to actually camp in the wild and everything,”” Lyla says tiredly. 

The cabin is vast, but, with wooden floors, walls, and ceiling, it feels much more claustrophobic. Avery walks in behind her, head low. Both girls' mascara runs down their faces in streaks as if they had been crying , fingers and cheeks red from the cold, snowflakes flung about their hair like sprinkles in ice cream. Avery, white as the snow falling outside, looks abhorred with herself. 

“We should go to the police.” 

“And say what?” quivers Lyla in response. Avery lowers her head and walks in defeatedly, dropping the conversation.

I startle, and jump up from the cold hardwood floor. Hadn’t I been standing? I glance around the hallway. It’s the same one that had just played out in the scene in my mind, the scene that Lyla and Avery starred in. What was that? It could have been my imagination, but it felt much too real. It felt like… a memory of some sort.  But not my own, or even of my missing sister, since I could see her, it was as if I was a third person witnessing the scene. But it was Avery I was watching, I am certain of it. 

But…that wouldn’t make sense. This cabin was in no way affiliated with my sister and Lyla. Especially since Lyla said Avery had dropped her off at her grandmother's house, where she lived, before they had even left the state, due to homesickness.

It wasn’t as though Lyla ever really came back, however. She returned quiet, haunted, and empty. She refused to talk to anyone, and withdrew from the town’s watchful eye. The town accepted this without question, attributing it to the loss of her best friend.

Banishing the absurd thought from my mind, I vigorously rub my eyes and gaze around the entrance hallway in attempted objectivity. It is very rustic, with wood everywhere and animal heads on the wall. A dim light casts a faint and unnerving glow around the room. I quickly shrug off my coat, close the door to silence the wails of the cold air behind me, and drop my backpack onto the floor. I only packed enough clothes and supplies to stay one night, but even still, as it hits the floor it lets out a heavy thud that echoes across the relatively empty room. There is minimal furniture, which strikes me as odd considering the hallway is extremely long. 

I walk down the hallway to the first door to my right. I twist it open and the door slowly creaks open, and I see… I see…

The next chapter is entirely made up of a flashback the protagonist is experiencing.

I jolt back. No, no, no. What did Avery say? I frantically will myself to my sister’s mind, but to no avail. The memory, or whatever it was, has ended. I can no longer cast doubt on what I saw. It was too vivid, too real to deny. Something happened to Avery and Lyla. Something that made Avery go missing and Lyla fall apart.

This time, I don’t even bother to glance around the room, I just catch glimpses of an orange sofa, and a large flatscreen tv before I slam the door. I  have to get out of here. Even if the preposterous idea is true, that I am witnessing Avery’s memories firsthand, this will not end well. It will only give me false hope of finding her, make me cling to the idea of seeing her again, as if it is a lifeboat and I am drowning.

The police did investigate her case, albeit halfheartedly. There were no leads, as Lyla had allegedly been dropped off at her grandmother's house long before the last sighting of my sister's ostentatiously lime green car. No evidence alluding to the fact she had been kidnapped or taken by ill intent of any sort. In the end, they chalked it up to a teenage runway. But they didn’t know Avery like I did. She never would have run away by choice.

Surely I couldn’t give up if this peculiar happening could lead me to my sister? It would be like knowing the answer on a test, and then leaving the question blank. Pointless,  inconvenient, and ultimately more harmful in the end. It seemed to me, I was already here. There is an undeniable connection between my sister's disappearance, the cabin, and me. And it was my job to figure it out.

I took a calm, cleansing breath, and reached for the brass doorknob across from me. Pushing it aside I enter the room.

At first, nothing happens. I can see green, dusty kitchen cupboards, olden appliances, a massive refrigerator looming in the corner forebodingly. And a dining table that was designed to seat about 12, but looked as if on its last legs, literally. And then, suddenly, with a disorienting sequence of flashes and spins, the room was filled with two extremely familiar faces.

Avery pokes at her lasagna, starving, but too nauseated to eat. Lyla attacks her food, taking out all her problems on her pasta. 

“We could have told the police, you know,” Avery whispers shamefully. 

“And say what? We would be in handcuffs before you could even say it wasn’t our fault,” Lyla retorts. 

“Still, we should have done something, " Avery says timidly. Lyla takes her time before responding. 

“There was nothing we could have done but run.”

Tears cascade down my face like waterfalls and drip down to the old, tacky carpet beneath me. Poor Avery. I have no idea what happened to my sister, what caused her absence, but it was obviously something terrible. In that moment, alone in an abandoned old cabin, my sorrow for my sister is so deep that as I sink to the floor, it chains me to the ground, weighing me down.

What could they be so upset about? Lyla was a star student, Avery was good enough, but this seemed to be about a matter of much more importance than schoolwork and grades. One doesn’t lie to their families about staying at their grandmother's house if they were really somewhere else due to a bad grade. And one definitely did not go missing because of an embarrassing grade or public humiliation.

But what could it be?  In our town the biggest crime to have happened was a grocery store break in a few years back, and a fist fight that had resulted in both instigators being apprehended before any real damage was done. As well as a hit and run that had happened a year ago a couple of towns over.

I had passed by the location on my way up here. The victim in question had been out for a quick run on the reclusive backroads of our quaint countryside. Nobody had seen the car, it must have sped off, as the police arrived on the scene fast. The man, injured, but not fatally, had called them, panicked, from his cell phone, which had miraculously not broken. He had not been facing the car, so he was unable to identify the vehicle, so the police gave up on that case pretty quickly.

It takes me a while to calm down. But after what seems like hours, my breathing slows down and my tears stop. I attempt to straighten up, carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders. This is some painful, tortuous game that better lead me to my sister, or at the very least, some answers. I must power through, I think, as I step through the next door.

“We should have stayed,” Avery repeats her earlier argument, with much more force this time. Lyla is in the corner depositing her backpack on the side of the rustic bunk bed.

“ I did what I had to do,” Lyla snarls. 

“You did not. I wanted to stay, I wanted to make sure he was ok. He could be dead right now and it could be all our fault,” Avery says regretfully. 

“Your fault, “Lyla corrects,” It was your car.”

“NO”, Avery screams, “ you were driving. YOU drove into him and YOU drove off when I begged you not to.” Lyla gets up angrily. 

“Who do you think they will blame? It’s your car. Even if there are security cameras or eyewitnesses, we’re both blonde, and both tall. Practically interchangeable to someone seeing us drive by fast.” When Lyla finishes her rant,  Avery storms out of the bedroom. Lyla follows.

Driving? Something had happened to them on their way up here. Had they crashed into someone and kept going?

The hit and run. The obvious answer dawns on me. Lyla and Avery (though unwillingly) had been the perpetrators. And between the incident and Lyla coming back, something had taken Avery away.

I had never thought Lyla capable of anything like this. To crash into someone is an accident, but to consciously run from the scene, that was inexcusable. Then returning home and lying about her whereabouts to everyone? I need answers. Leaving the room, I go in the direction that Avery had once stormed off to, and come face to face with the second to last unopened door. Pulling the handle, I step into the bathroom.

Avery desperately throws water on her face at the sink. It muddles with her tears and water is dripping all over the hideously tiled floors. Lyla stands in the doorway and stares her down. She is no longer recognizable as  the sweet, caring, selfless girl she once was.  She is now a monster, hardened by the circumstances, weighed down by her options, and desperate for safety. She narrows her eyes menacingly and exhales before she says what she has to say. What she can’t take back.

And I realize as I jolt back to the present day. Lyla went back to town because there was nothing to connect her alone to the accident. Avery owned the car, and since they drove off so fast, they didn’t know who was watching or if the man had died. Any person could have seen them. Anything they found on Avery’s car, hair or blood, could be enough to send them both to jail.  But, if Lyla supposedly was never in that car, she would be safe. As well as that, she had a plausible alibi. She lived with her elderly grandmother, who could much less take care of herself then Lyla, and if Lyla had told her she had arrived much earlier then she actually had, her grandmother would not be able to tell the difference. And that was why she had returned home, and Avery had not.

But where was Avery? And then, a wave of inspiration hits me. What if Avery never left this cabin? What if she is still here, and her car as well? Would Lyla have done something to my sister? Was she hidden away somewhere?

I race out across the property like a mad woman, and thrust open the doors to the eclectic barn. 

I don’t know how to feel about what I see in front of me. It’s not Avery, which disheartens me slightly, but not before I see something else. A lime green car, bumped, bruised, and bloody. Avery’s. She must be here, if her car is. 

Leaving the barn, I remember the final door I have yet to open. Maybe it will be another memory. Maybe it will lead me to answers about Avery! Elated at this prospect, I practically skip across the property and down the hallway.

This is it. This is the door. This will either confirm my thoughts and lead me to Avery, or make me leave feeling even more foolish and hopeless than I did before I arrived. But I must take this risk.

I  open the door, and am so overwhelmed by what I see that I jump back. It’s not a flashback, or anything like it.

It’s Avery. Smaller, tired, weaker than before, but it is my sister.  My sister that had been missing for a year, sitting alert on a dusty pink canopy bed in the center of an otherwise empty room.

A thousand feelings brim to the surface, and I don’t know what to do. I decide to follow my instincts, and I run and scoop her up in a hug. Wordlessly, she hugs me back, our tears mixing until we don’t know whose is whose, and our hearts soaring.

I can’t wrap my head around the fact that it is real, not another cruel flashback that inspires and then squashes hope. She has the same bright brown eyes, pouty red lips. Her hair is more bedraggled, like a bird's nest, and she is thinner than I remember. But, I could recognize my sister anywhere. Especially after 12 grueling months desperately searching for her face in crowds of strangers, just to be disappointed each time it wasn’t her.

After an hour of crying and hugging and adjusting, she has filled in all the gaps, as I have for her. She did not know Lyla had returned to the town and proceeded to act normally. She had thought that she had really killed someone and was living with the guilt, which I quickly assured her was not what had happened. She had gotten a job waitressing in a diner, and the pay was good, so she had been able to provide for herself.

I was at first angry, but rationality soon brought forth the realization that it was not my sister's fault. She had been scared by Lyla, so scared of going to jail that she had, ironically, imprisoned herself up here.  She had told me she had planned on coming out of hiding eventually, as with each day of solitude, she had accepted more and more her fate of jail.

But I was sure she would not be sentenced to jail if we could just tell the police all that had happened, that she had feared for her life, and had not been the one to hit the car, nor to run off. And since the man was alive and recovered, even if she was found guilty, the crime would not be as serious as vehicular  manslaughter, or anything of the sort.

For Lyla, the punishment would probablynot be as lenient for her as it would be for my sister. I mentally count the list of crimes in my head. First, the hit and run, then coercing my sister into hiding, then pretending she knew nothing about the hit and run. I wasn’t sure the last one was a crime, but it should be. She did not reach out to my sister and told her she could come back, or even checked if she was ok.

Clarity washes over me like a warm, comforting bath, and for the first time in a year, I have the feeling that everything will be ok. Together, hands threaded into one, me and my sister walk out the front door, away from the cabin, away from the horrors of the past, and stumbling blindly into our reunited future.