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It was the guilt that was the worst.

Guilt at the thought that her disappearance could have been prevented so easily.

Cheryl could have told Jack that she wasn’t going to wait for him to finish his meeting, Oliver could have met his friends later and walked Eva home and Eva’s parents could have been more watchful and realized that the same car had been slowly crawling up their streets three times a week for almost four months before Eva went missing.

It was the guilt with which each of these persons had to make their peace, but of course that was the hardest thing.

Cheryl cried herself to sleep for six months before the great numbness overtook her. If her parents hadn’t been so anxious, they would have sent Cheryl to stay with her Aunt who owned a blissful little cottage in the Lake District. But being forcefully separated from a child was too hard to bear to send the other child away voluntarily.

Surprisingly Oliver took Eva’s disappearance the hardest, sometime he was dealing with it even worse than Cheryl. But rather than becoming visibly upset as Cheryl did and freely showing her emotions, Oliver masked them under the rage that had been growing with each day that the police failed to find Eva. His anger grew with every time that he went to the station to give yet another statement, or each time the detective came to his house to ask him something specific about Eva. Like what coat she was wearing, was it possible that she had run away or if there were problems at home.

It had briefly entered Oliver’s mind that she could have run away. Once Eva had expressed a sense of claustrophobia at being a twin, but that was only once and she would never have run away leaving Cheryl on her own, there was a bigger sense of purpose and dedication within her that didn’t permit her to leave. Also she had promised to come to his party. He had felt silly when he told the detective this, but Eva couldn’t lie. She wouldn’t have promised if she hadn’t meant to attend.

The ringing of his phone drew Oli out of his train of thought. It was Cheryl.

“They want us to go down to the station again.”

He had been to the police station so many times in the past three years that he could have walked through it blind and still found his way around. The police station was the only time when he actually saw Cheryl. He had been to visit her family frequently, having requested to take some photos that were in Eva’s room to put up in his own. But he always tried to avoid seeing Cheryl, because seeing Cheryl meant seeing a person that looked exactly like Eva, who walked and talked and was present. But she wasn’t Eva, even if they were identical. She could never be Eva.

Cheryl had changed almost as much as Oli had over the past three moths; she had become thin and withdrawn. She looked older than she was and carried a sadness with her that pressed down on her, like the weight that Oli woke up with every morning.

“What is it now?” Oli asked as he dragged the toe of his canvas shoe across the linoleum floor. He and Cheryl were sat on the plastic orange chairs in the waiting room, watching Mr and Mrs Teale at the reception.

“They didn’t say but we think they’ve found… something.”

The something was a coat.

After three months it looked dilapidated and scuffed, stained with black, which at first Oli thought was blood, but the forensic scientist explained to them that it was oil. Someone who was hoping to still find something of value had found the coat at a rubbish dumping ground. They had recognized it because there had recently been another photo of Eva in the newspaper, with a picture of the coat she had been wearing.

“There are no finger prints on the coat, and the only hair we could find was Eva’s,” the chief constable said trying to keep the sadness out of his voice.

Mrs Teale stretched her hand out and touched the coat, before turning away and walking shakily out the room. She had cried enough in front of her child and family, Mr Teale looked distressed and disheartened.

“So what does this mean?” Oli asked angrily, unsure of what the purpose was in being in the room. Was it just to anger him even more by showing them a possession that had belong and been treasured by Eva?

“It shows that whoever took Eva had been careless, they should have burnt the coat. We also were informed of a potential sighting of Eva, a lead into which we are going to investigate thoroughly.”

The last sentence should have gotten Oli’s hopes up. Over the past months the police said that they had been told of lots of sightings of a girl that was supposedly Eva, but every time it turned out to be someone else. This time was probably not going to be an exception. There was nothing he could do but nod his head and shoot a sideways glance at Cheryl, who seemed disconnected from everything.

“Do you think… she’s dead?” Cheryl asked Oli tentatively a couple of hours later as they were both sat in a coffee shop, their steaming mugs of tea left untouched.

“No,” Oli said at once, looking at Cheryl angrily. How dare she ask that? How dare she even think that?

“It’s just that… it would be easier being dead than locked up somewhere with horrible people…” Cheryl was a shadow of the girl she used to be, and that had flooded over into her life. Her boyfriend broke up with her two months after Eva disappeared, her school grades were slipping and the boisterous person that could light up a room had vanished, just like her better half had.

“No, don’t you ever say that. There is nothing easier about Eva dying,”

Oli stopped himself from continuing, downed his tea and said a hasty goodbye to Cheryl. He couldn’t be around her for very long, she just reminded him too much of Eva.

The months slipped by and so did Oliver’s performance in school. At first the teachers understood, but as the five-month mark approached many told Oliver that he had to start looking for some normality in his life and he had to carry on as he had before.

All this talk by the teachers infuriated them. Without Eva there it felt as if someone had ripped out his heart. Her disappearance left a throbbing wound that never healed. He missed having her in his life and refused to wake up to the idea that the police may never find her. He was sure that she was still alive and even though he hardly ever agreed on anything Cheryl had to say, they both knew she was alive. They both felt it.

He saw Eva in everything; any simple thing bringing up a memory highlighting the intense friendship that they shared and which could only be compared to her and Cheryl’s twin bond. As month by month slipped past and Oliver kept resorting to favourite old memories it dawned on him that their friendship relationship was on the brink of something else.

It was cruel that he realized these new feelings at a time when Eva was so far away from him. That he had to acknowledge this new state of events without her, there was no slow growing of the greatest feeling in the world. It just slapped him coldly across the face and reminded him of what he had lost. There wasn’t a day when she wasn’t present in his mind, or when he saw her during the day.

There are those who say that with time, the heart heals. But there is always a throbbing wound, a hole where something else used to be. There wasn’t one morning where Oliver didn’t wake up with a heavy load pressing down on his shoulders. Even on the day when he found out the band was signed, his first thought was of how nice it would have been to be able to call Eva first and tell her the good news.

Those who didn’t know him well always proceeded to jab at him and question why he couldn’t commit to any girl for longer than two months.

He had been hesitant dating. Without meaning to, every girl that crossed his path he compared with Eva. They were too tall, too short, too brunette, too blonde, too alternative, too pierced, too fake, too minimalistic, too eccentric, too fussy, too boring, too plain. Too much not like Eva. His lack of relationship was always flung back in his face, hand in hand with the fact that several one-night stands had stacked up next to Oli’s name.

But the loneliness was settling into his stomach each day. He didn’t want to be alone, but he didn’t want to be with a person who wasn’t Eva. She had known him best, and yet she had only known the beginnings of a person. When last she saw him, people still called him Oliver. Now he insisted that everyone called him Oli and barely had any skin left unmarked. From the outside it appeared as if there was very little left of the Oliver that Eva had known and counted as her best friend unconditionally.

His sleep was disturbed. He had hardly had a single good nights sleep in months. The nightmares that taunted him kept him up at all hours, and the nights when he attempted to dull them with alcohol only led to him waking up in the morning with the sour taste of regret still linger on his tongue. He would pace his flat, glancing at the old photos he had been allowed to take from Eva’s room, only because he was in them. Her parents were fiercely protective of Eva’s things.

As the five year mark of her disappearance approached, Oli found himself walking down a road that was achingly familiar. He hadn’t visited the Teale’s house for a very very long time and Eva’s parents understood why. So it was to their greatest surprise and sadness that they opened the door and found Oliver stood on the doorstep asking to see Eva’s room.

They hadn’t changed anything.

It looked as if it was trapped in time, as if the past five years hadn’t happened. As if it was just an ordinary day. There were single items of clothing strewn around the floor, ones that Eva had picked up on that Wednesday and then discarded in favour of another outfit for Oliver’s birthday. Everything was just as Eva had left it. It felt as if she had momentarily gone out the room and would be back at any minute.

Closing the door behind him, Oliver continued look around the room and couldn’t stop the tears that had been collecting in his eyes from falling.