We were identical twins, born minutes apart, raised in the same house by the same parents with the same advantages and the same wounds.

We faced the same fire on the same night at the same age of seventeen.

By every measure of nature and circumstance that people use to explain how a person turns out, we should have turned out the same.

And we could not have turned out more different, and the difference was not in our genes or our upbringing, which were identical, but entirely in the choices we each made, over and over, at every fork, starting that night.

On the night of the fire, faced with the same seconds, one of us chose to run in and one of us chose to run away from what she had done.