The twins were gone for nearly a year. Each day, Zrinka woke wondering if they were even still out there. She wondered if, as with Alana, they would hear a whisper that they were found dead. She also wondered if they had left purposefully, and that pained her yet more.

She sat at the kitchen table, two weeks after they'd disappeared, when it was clear that they were not coming back anytime soon. She stirred mindlessly the soggy cereal floating in the milk. The bowl had been chipped from years of rambunctious use. The spoon was spotted with age. Zrinka watched as tears fell into the froth.

Maria sat across from her reading a newspaper so intently that it seemed she was searching for the answer to life's riddle. She noticed the muffled sobs and looked up worriedly. Zrinka had by far taken the twins' departure the hardest, and the others were struggling to keep her sane.

"Hey, wherever they are, there's a reason for it," Maria intoned. "They're okay."

"I admire your objectivity," Zrinka said weakly. "But it doesn't work for me."

~

Months later, when she'd finally gotten it to work, she saw a ghost as she walked through the center with Costel. Her feet stopped moving and her eyes locked on the face that was so different yet exactly the same.

"Zrinka?" Costel wondered, eyeing his sister with concern. She dropped his hand and stepped closer to the man, tentatively.

From behind him, a woman appeared. She was gaunt and had a new worry about her.

Costel followed his sister's eyeline and saw them too. Strangers. He hid at Zrinka's side, looking up to her for confirmation, for safety.

"It's really them," she assured, though to say she was sure herself was a stretch. "For so long, I've seen them in everyone I pass."

Pietro and Wanda began to close the distance on the sidewalk between them. They were nervous and unfamiliar too. It had been so long that neither party knew what the two pairs were to each other anymore.

"Zrinka?" Wanda said in a voice that was raw and hazy.

Zrinka only nodded. Costel moved from behind her and approached Pietro, who smiled, almost as bright and charming as it had been before. Before. When the twins had left, there had become a new Before and an After.

"Hi, little man," Pietro said through that slightly off-kilter grin.

Costel seemed like he was going to embrace this strange man, but recoiled at the last second.

"You were gone a year," Zrinka said fiercely. "Where were you?"

Wanda looked down and shook her head in regret, frustration, pain. Pietro stared this peculiar new Zrinka down and opened his mouth to speak.

"The lab. Zrinka, they were wrong about it. Strucker wasn't meaning to hurt anyone. He was helping them. He tried to help Alana, but she wasn't strong enough."

"What are you saying?" Zrinka's voice broke.

"The experiments worked on us."

"What?" Zrinka's hand came to her mouth.

Wanda spoke coldly, "We were his rats. He convinced us that we were perfect for it."

"But you..." Zrinka knew how they felt about the mythologized laboratory where Frankenstein tried to make his monsters. "How could you let him?"

"He convinced us," Pietro said as that proud and tenacious glint returned to his glistening baby blue eyes. With grandeur, he continued, "He made us into miracles."