The house where they had grown up stood at the end of a dead-end street, on the edge of a wood that changed color with the rhythm of the seasons. Their father often said the house had "a soul." Their mother insisted it wasn't the house it was the people living in it who made it alive.
Allia and Elia agreed with both.
They had been born on a winter night, during a snowstorm. The midwives later said they had never seen two babies search for each other's gaze so soon. People say twins have a special bond. For them, it was more than a bond. It was a fusion. Something obvious, unquestionable.
Their father called them his two lights.
Their mother called them her two shadows, because they followed their brothers everywhere, silent as cats.
The differences appeared early not in their looks, for they were almost identical, but in their eyes.
Allia had soft eyes, always glistening with some emotion, as if she felt everything too deeply. A natural empathy. She was the one who cupped insects in her hands to set them free outside, the one who cried when a baby bird fell from its nest.
Elia simply watched. Always. Her gaze revealed almost nothing. It weighed, measured. She looked at people like puzzles, as if she were searching for the missing piece in each of them.
Yet they got along wonderfully. Quarrels were rare, and when they happened, they ended in laughter. It was a gentle childhood. A close-knit family. Weekends at the lake. Chocolate cakes on Sundays. A handyman father who fixed everything, a teacher mother who read them stories every night before sleep.
Nothing foretold what was to come.
The neighbor was a fifteen-year-old boy who lived alone with a father who was often away. He wasn't really mean, but… strange. He followed the twins with his eyes whenever they passed his house. Sometimes he spoke to them. Sometimes he mimicked them. Sometimes he laughed to himself.
Allia didn't like it.
Elia didn't either.
But Elia said nothing.
One spring evening, while their brothers were at soccer practice and their parents were preparing dinner, Allia realized her sister had vanished. The swing in the garden was still swaying slowly, as if someone had just gotten off it.
"Elia?" she called.
No answer.
A cold intuition slid down the back of her neck. She knew. She didn't know what, but she knew something had just gone off course.
The garden shed door was ajar.
Allia went in.
And the world changed.
Elia stood beneath the flickering yellow light of a buzzing bulb. In front of her lay the body of the fifteen-year-old boy too big for the small space. His arms bent at wrong angles. His head twisted at an unnatural angle. A shovel, still warm, rested in Elia's hands.
Allia's legs buckled.
"What… Elia…?"
Elia's face was blank, as if she had just woken from a dream.
"He grabbed my wrist. He wanted me to come to his house," she said in a voice that was calm too calm. "So… I made him stop."
As if it were logical. Obvious. Natural.
Allia should have screamed. Or run. Or called their parents.
But something inside her closed.
Or opened it was hard to tell.
She stepped closer to her sister and placed a hand on the arm that was barely trembling.
"I'll help you."
Not another word.
No judgment.
Just that instinctive certainty: Elia had done something irreparable. And Allia would, forever, clean up after her.
That night, they worked together like two small adults with clumsy but determined movements. They moved the body. They scrubbed the stains. They hid the tools. Allia even took it upon herself to erase their footprints in the damp earth.
Their father noticed their arms were dirty.
They said they'd been playing in the garden soil.
He smiled and sent them to wash their hands before dinner.
No one ever knew.
But from that day on, something changed in the house.
An invisible tension.
A shadow that followed the twins.
And every night, Allia stared at the ceiling, wondering:
What had been in Elia's eyes that day?
And what else was going to emerge?