"Emily!"

The tears were there before I opened my eyes, and I sat bolt upright in bed. I was in bed? I shook my head, feeling disoriented. I had been driving…hadn't I? Was it a dream? Had I been asleep? Was I awake now? Was this a dream? A light went on in the hallway and my dad threw my bedroom door open.

"Lauren, it's the middle of the night! What are you screaming about?" He stormed. I blinked up at him, and my obvious distress seemed to temper his rage and he clenched and unclenched his fists, visibly trying to calm himself. "Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

"Was I screaming? Are you sure?" I asked, screwing my eyes shut, trying to remember. "Sorry, dad. I think I must have been dreaming."

"Well, it must have been some dream, then!" He said, shaking his head. I recognised that his rage had been born more of fear than annoyance. "You scared me half to death."

"Right…" I nodded, feeling like there was something I was supposed to have remembered. The dream was fading fast, and the more I tried to hold onto it, the more it slipped away. "Is Emily home?"

"She better be!" He said, his expression morphing from concern to annoyance again. "It's after five! If she's still at that party, I swear-"

"Calm down." I cut him off, throwing myself back onto my pillow. "We agreed: no lectures before nine. It'll only end in tears."

"Well, it looks like that ship has already sailed." He muttered, gesturing at the slowly drying tears on my cheeks.

"I didn't say it would end in my tears." I shrugged. "I'm not above making a grown man cry, you know."

"Jesus wept." He exclaimed, turning to leave.

"Then I suppose He must have had teenage daughters too?" I replied, mockingly, making the easy joke before my dad could. He shook his head, but didn't reply before closing my door.

I rolled onto my back, sighing as I struggled to remember the dream. The only detail I could recall was the tree. I thought maybe I had been walking towards it. Or running, I thought. I wasn't sure why it had scared me so much, but even now, my heart still pounded in my chest.

I flipped my pillow and closed my eyes, settling back in to go to sleep just as my door was flung open for the second time and my dad returned, glaring down at me.

"Come in?" I grumbled, sleepily. "Do you have an appointment?"

"Where is she?" He demanded. I cracked an eye open, and slowly raised myself to sit up.

"What do you mean?"

"Don't play dumb, Lauren." He snapped. "I know you two think that I zip up the back, but she doesn't do anything without you knowing about it. Where. Is. She?"

"She's not in bed?" I asked, as my stomach flipped, queasily. The tree from my dream flashed in my mind's eye and I blinked the image away, but I felt a flutter of panic rise in my chest.

"You know damn well she's not." He insisted. I rose to my feet and brushed past him, ignoring his indignant protests as I reached for the phone on my dresser. I had missed a call from her an hour before. She had been at Lisa Carmichael's house. Had she been too drunk to drive home? She wouldn't…no, I shook my head, banishing the thought before I could finish it. Emily was sensible. She wouldn't risk driving home if she wasn't sober. Maybe she had decided to crash at Lisa's.

"Well?" My dad prompted, red-faced with barely contained anger.

"Shut up." I said, breezily, calling my voicemail.

"I beg your-"

"Shhhh." I cut him off, frowning as I tried to listen.

"Hey Lauren. I know it's late, and you're probably asleep right now - like I should be. Aren't you practically nocturnal these days?"

I didn't hear the rest. I didn't have to. The dream came rushing back to me, and my phone fell from my hand as my mouth opened in a silent scream.

"What…and where do you think you're going?" My dad demanded as I whipped towards the door and raced past him. I ignored him. I didn't understand how I had seen what I'd seen, but if the voicemail was real, then that meant the rest of it might be. That meant she might have actually crashed - she could be badly hurt or…or…I froze halfway down the stairs.

"Lauren?" My dad appeared on the top landing, and I felt him freeze behind me. He saw it too, then. It wasn't just a remnant of a vivid nightmare. For a moment, I had almost let myself believe I was still asleep.

I couldn't move; couldn't acknowledge him; couldn't see anything but the flashing blue light illuminating the entrance hall at the bottom of the stairs. Flashing blue light that spilled in through the window on the front door from the police car parked outside of my house. The police car that belonged to the policeman who was rapping on the door now, who had come to tell us what, in my heart, I already knew.

I collapsed where I stood, sliding down a few more stairs before I came to rest on the bottom landing. I felt like I was watching in slow motion as my father stepped over me to make his way, unsteadily, to the front door.

He knew. Of course he knew. He hadn't seen what I had seen, but he knew that Emily's bed was empty and there was a police car in our driveway at five o'clock in the morning.

I didn't even hear what the policeman said, didn't even look up when my mother joined them, didn't feel a thing as I watched both of my parents holding each other, sobbing and wailing and breaking. I was catatonic. I was gone. I stood up after an immeasurable amount of time and my stumbling feet dragged me back to my bed. I closed my eyes, alone in the darkness.

And then: then, I cried. I cried and cried until I was empty, until I had no more tears left, and then I cried some more. I cried for hours. I cried until it ached, until the ache numbed, and then ached again. I cried until the sun rose, then set again, until I fell asleep and dreamed about her. The same dream. I wondered if I would ever have another.

Only, it wasn't a dream, was it? It had been real. It wasn't possible, of course. But that seemed like a meaningless detail. I had dreamed that my sister had died, and she was dead. The voicemail she had left me - I had heard it before I ever picked up my phone. And that meant that the dream had been real. And if the dream had been real, then the implications of that were much too great for my ruined mind to process.

The only thing I could be certain of was that something had killed my sister. Some unseen force had sent her crashing to her death. Why? Of the two of us, Emily was always the softer one, the gentler one. We were identical twins, but only on the outside. Emily was the nicer one, the better one. Why would anybody want to hurt her? And how?

I didn't know, but I promised her then that I would find out.

I listened to her voicemail again, over and over until eventually, grief and exhaustion won out and sleep claimed me once more.

"If dad asks, I got home at one o'clock…you're my alibi, okay? Love you, Loz."