The centre of the retreat was a multi-storey guesthouse, painted bright yellow to stand out from the mountain, with a pillared entryway. It puffed smoke from a brick chimney that braced a side wall like a rod, and it had an advertiser’s dream amount of snow dappled on the roof. Within the five rows of windows, several glowed with soft yellow light, like an advent calendar. The guesthouse was preceded by a gauntlet of a dozen chalets, built in two rows of six, with corrugated iron roofs that reached all the way to the ground, matching the slope of the mountain, allowing floor-to-ceiling windows on the front face, for unimpeded views of the rocky peak. I would be staying in one of these shark’s teeth, but I wasn’t sure which one was number 6, my designation on Katherine’s itinerary, so I rolled through to where several cars were parked to the side of the guesthouse.

I recognised a few of them: my stepfather’s Mercedes SUV, which had a dishonest BABY ON BOARD sign in the back window, because he thought cops pulled him over less frequently with it; Aunt Katherine’s Volvo station wagon, snow-bogged already because she’d driven up a day earlier; Lucy’s [REDACTED CAR TYPE], blending in with the snow, the car so often Instagrammed and gloated about as her ‘business reward’. My rescuer’s Land Rover was also there – of course it was; in a book like this it may as well have had the numberplate ‘M33T-QT’. I recognised it from the large plastic snorkel.

Katherine was steaming across the lot before I’d gotten out of the car, leaning into a slight limp caused by a car accident in her mid-twenties. She was the dictionary definition of Baby Sister to my father, the age gap so significant that when my mother pumped out us Cunningham Boys in her thirties, I was closer in age to my aunt than my mother was to her sister-in-law. So, growing up, I remember Katherine as youthful, energetic and fun. She’d bring us presents and regale us with fantastic stories. I thought she was popular, too, because people would talk about her at family barbecues when she wasn’t there. But age gives perspective, and now I know the difference between being popular and being talked about. Intervention came in the form of a wet road and a bus stop. The accident broke a lot of her bones and crumpled her leg, but it also straightened her out. Now, the only thing you really need to know about Katherine is that her two favourite sentences are ‘What time do you call this?’ and ‘re: my previous email’.