I am not an overly suspicious person, not at all. Not like my brother was. He always believed that the worst was yet to come, that there was some sourly fated event just around the corner of every street and down every dark alleyway. Our mother always said that he would never leave the nest, fly away and make his own one day. He was 25 and still seeking consolation in the wafting incense of our mothers superstitions. Our father, a grumping old thud of a man, worked every day of his life, for 10 hours a day, since he was 15 years old - as he likes to repeat at least seven times a day. He was so close to retirement but showed no signs of interest in going on holidays and doing jigsaws with us. My mother was the opposite - an artist and a stay at home mother. She was flowy, angelic and maybe even a little too supportive. She always said my brother was special, in his own way of course, and that we couldn’t expect of him what we expect of ourselves because he will never live up to that. It was always her way of being nice about the fact that he was completely incompetent.

He held no secrets, his life was no mystery. He was a creature of habit. He liked it that way. And so when he came bursting through the front door, panting heavily as he launched his backpack across the room then bolted the door closed, I was immediately concerned - for his sanity mind you. He muttered aimlessly to himself, pacing back and forth, and then suddenly stormed through to the kitchen, where I heard the bolting of the door that lead into our backyard.

I had queried about his behaviour, and he drove into an endless rant about how he noticed that at the corner store between the college and the station, a strange figure was watching him as he crossed the road to reach his bus. He had proceeded into his suspicions of being tracked and followed and stalked, and at one point he raved about how he knew that this would happen because how could it not? I attempted to calm him but he raced away up the stairs, not before scooping up his backpack, and slammed his bedroom door closed. He was in there for hours, refusing to come down for tea. From his room we heard rattling and bumping, as if things were falling or he was throwing things. Our mother had floated up there to check in and offer one of his favourite after-tea snacks. He refused. Next, I climbed up and chatted on his door, lingering, and told him that if he wanted to sit with me and play a game, we could do that. He retorted back with a ‘not now’. It had reached the later evening, and we were all still waiting anxiously for my brother to behave like his usual self again - but he never returned. My father sauntered up at the back of 9, chapping his door a total of three times before pushing the door open and finding my brother's bedroom entirely abandoned. He hollered for us to join him at the door frame, where we found his room disheveled as if there had been a storm that hit only this room.

The window was wide open, the night time breeze giving life to the curtains and the sound of a faraway neighbour's dog howling at the fullness of the moon. There was no note, no indication of where he had gone. Did he leave voluntarily or was he taken?

My mother had called the authorities quickly after our discovery, and for weeks after she isolated herself in her bed, refusing visitors and conversation. My father rarely slept and waited by the door on the stern lounge chair, prepared to welcome back his only child. Months had passed, nothing had changed. He was still gone, no sign, no clues. It was like he had just ceased to exist. Except that wasn’t entirely true. When I took the shortcut home one day, I heard a voice call out for me. When I turned around curiously, I saw his face, battered and bruised, almost unrecognisable. He looked older and harder and all he had to say was two words, with a faint nostalgic smile, “my sister”.