I headed straight to their house, walked inside, and shouted, “Mom! Dad! Where are you?”

It was barely six in the morning, and my dad ran down the stairs half-dressed for work in suit pants and a white T-shirt without any socks or a dress shirt. My mom came running towards us from the kitchen in a nightgown and robe.

“Where the hell have you been?” my dad asked when he caught sight of me mid-way down the stairs. “When I told you that you were doing a good job and could leave on time, I didn’t mean that you could disappear for days on end with only a single text to tell us you’d gotten into an argument with Faith and needed us to check on her. You could’ve at least bothered to call your mother and let her know you were alive.”

My mom rushed towards me. “But now he’s standing right here, so stop yelling at him and let him tell us what’s wrong.”

When she reached out to give me a hug, I took a step back and shook my head. “I have some questions.”

My mom looked devastated that I wouldn’t let her hug me. She stood perfectly still, her hands still stretched towards me as her skin paled and tears filled her eyes. “About what, honey?”

“Declan.”

All it took was the mention of my dead twin’s name for the tears in my mom’s eyes to overflow and spill down her cheeks. He’d been gone for five years, and we hardly ever talked about him because the pain was so overwhelming. For all of us. But the time had finally come for me to get the answers that I should have demanded after the accident.

My dad moved to my mom’s side. He wrapped his arm around her and led her over to the couch in the living room off the foyer. Mom patted the cushion next to her, and I sat down. When she grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly, I could tell she was trying to gather herself. Dad dropped down on the opposite side of her and took hold of her other hand.

“When I woke up after the crash, an entire month had passed.” I scrubbed my hands over my face. My eyes started to sting, and I pressed my fingers against them. “As devastated I was when you told me that Declan had died in the accident, I was so relieved that he hadn’t suffered. Even if it meant that I missed his burial and couldn’t visit his grave until after I’d fully recovered from my own injuries.”

“We know, son.” My dad reached over and gripped my arm. “If we had known you were going to wake up when you did, we wouldn’t have buried him without you. It’s something we regretted, and we’re so sorry.”

His easy apology only made what I had to say next that much harder. “No, I understand why you did it that way. There was no way of knowing when I would wake up, and you couldn’t wait forever. But because everything was so fucked up, I never really asked any questions.”

“What kind of questions?” my dad asked.

“Ones I should have asked back then,” I mumbled.

“You were recovering,” my mom excused me. “You had just woken up from a coma and had your own serious injuries to contend with.”

“But he was my twin!” I railed. “And I didn’t even ask you any questions about his death. We never really talked about him once I got out of the hospital. It was like this huge piece of me was torn from the world and I just let it go without a second thought. I let him go.”

“You didn’t,” my mom argued. “Not really. You changed so much after the accident. Declan was always the serious one and you were such a jokester. He never put off for tomorrow what could be done today, and you always waited until the very last minute. Although you were identical twins, you each had such different personalities. Then he was gone, and you weren’t yourself anymore. It was more than just recovering from your own injuries, which were severe on their own. But the loss of Declan, it changed you.”

“Your mom is right,” Dad agreed. “I don’t know when the last time was that I heard you tell a joke.”

“And I never had to push you to get your homework done when you went back to school.”

Dad nodded. “You even made sure all your college stuff was sent in early.”

I realized they were right. When I woke up after the accident, I felt like I had to make up for Declan’s loss in some way. “Maybe in a way, I was trying to live both our lives.”

“And as hard as it was for us to stand by and watch, we knew that you were using gambling as your outlet for when it got to be too much.”

“We understood because we were angry at the world too,” my mom added. “A parent should never have to live through the death of a child. The stages of grief are relentless and every day you feel like a piece of you is missing.”

Rationally, I knew their loss was as big as mine. Maybe even bigger because even though Declan was my twin, he was their son. But knowing about their pain and understanding how in the hell Faith could’ve ended up with his kidney inside her a month after he was supposed to have died were two different things. “That’s why I’m struggling so much with this. He was my identical twin. We’d been together from the moment of conception and for every day of our lives until that damn accident. Only to find out years later that you guys lied to me about how he died. When he died. It’s killing me.”

“Oh my God,” my mom cried, burying her face in my dad’s chest. “He knows.”

“That Declan didn’t die until a month after the crash? Yeah, I know.”

My dad’s gaze locked with mine, and I was surprised to see what I thought might be relief in his eyes. “How’d you find out?”

I pulled the letters out of the front pocket of my jeans, smoothed them out, and handed them to him. “Faith stumbled across the truth when she reached out to her donor family to say thank you. The transplant center offered to forward her letter to them, and they sent it to you.”

“What?” My mom’s head jerked up, and she yanked the letters from my dad’s hands. Her reaction answered any questions I’d had about her possibly knowing about Faith’s connection to Declan and that being the reason why she’d reached out to her in the first place. “Faith’s kidney came from Declan? That’s what your argument was about? No wonder she was so distant with us when we tried to talk to her on Thursday.”

“She must be the patient the surgeon was talking about when—”

“You’re right. She has to be,” my mom interrupted my dad as she glanced down at the letters. “There was a doctor who came in to talk to us about donating Declan’s organs. He explained how the process worked and how many lives we could save if we agreed. But we struggled with the decision because it meant saying goodbye to your brother. And then he made it personal.”

My dad continued the story when my mom couldn’t go on because she started to sob. “He told us about a young girl they’d been treating who was likely to never get a transplant because she was too much of a risk. She didn’t have any family to help her after the surgery, and the odds of her making a full recovery were slim. He said that her only chance was a direct donation, but there wasn’t anyone in her life who cared enough to make that kind of sacrifice.”

“When we agreed to allow Declan to be a donor,” my mom sniffled. “It was under the condition that she was one of the recipients if they were a match. If your brother was going to save lives with his death, we felt that he would have wanted one of them to be someone who wouldn’t have had that chance without him. You know how he always loved to root for the underdog.”

They were right. If Declan had been alive to make the decision, he would’ve wanted to save someone like Faith. I could understand and respect their decision to donate his organs, and their story explained how Faith had gotten her kidney when she’d thought it was impossible. But there was still one detail that didn’t make sense to me. “But how was that even possible? You guys told me he died in the crash. Faith’s transplant was a month after that. The only way his kidney is inside her is if you guys lied to me. But why would you do that about something as important as Declan’s death?”

My parents shared a long look, and my dad nodded before my mom turned to me again. “The doctors had warned us that your recovery was going to be incredibly difficult. We’d been preparing ourselves for that, and then you woke up and your only concern was Declan. Not yourself, even though you were hooked up to so many machines and had to have been in pain. You were desperate for us to tell you about Declan.”

“Because I needed to know what happened to him. He was my twin. I deserved the truth!”

“I’m sorry we lied to you, Dillon. But we didn’t feel like we had much of a choice because we didn’t think you could handle the truth.” I shook my head at my dad’s confession, refusing to believe it. He hurriedly explained more about why they made the decision they had. “The psychiatrist we talked to said it was likely that you would struggle with survivor guilt. We expected it to be worse because of the circumstances surrounding the accident, and we were right. You blamed yourself, no matter how often we told you it wasn’t your fault.

“We had just lost Declan, and we were desperate to make sure we didn’t lose you too,” my mom cried. “So we told you what you needed to hear to make sure that didn’t happen.”

“It would have devastated you even more to know that he spent a month in a hospital bed next to you but didn’t survive. You had a hard enough time dealing with his loss when you thought he died in the crash.”

I couldn’t deny the truth in my dad’s words. Not when the one thing I’d held onto for so long was the fact that Declan hadn’t suffered. It destroyed me to know that wasn’t the case, but it would’ve been worse if I’d known it back then.

I dropped my head and stared at my hands while I tried to come to terms with the actual truth and not the story my parents had fabricated in their attempt to protect me. “It’s going to take me a while to wrap my head around the fact that you guys lied to me for so long.”

My mom stifled another sob and choked out my name.

“Later, Elaine. Let him come to terms with this first,” my dad murmured softly.

My head jerked up and I searched both their faces, trying to figure out what he could be talking about. “Later for what?”

“To push you on how you’re dealing with Faith being the recipient of Declan’s kidney. How she’s holding up since we backed off when it seemed like we were the last people she wanted to talk to about your fight. You know how your mom likes to meddle, but now isn’t the time. Not while you’re dealing with what we’ve already told you. It’s enough for the time being. Anything else can wait.”

“It’s not meddling to worry about how he and Faith are handling—”

She paused as though she couldn’t figure out the right word to use, and I filled in the gap. “Our strange connection?”

She sighed and nodded her head. “I can see how you’d feel like this changes everything between the two of you.”

Shit. That wasn’t the kind of meddling I’d been expecting from her. I’d been hoping for words of wisdom that would help me come to terms with the fact that Faith had Declan’s kidney. Not understanding and agreement.