I was grateful for Juliette’s firmness. Searching for Lucy had been the only thing stopping us leaving. We weren’t really trapped by the storm, as happens so frequently in these types of novels. We weren’t trapped at all. But we were chained by our own egos, our regrets, our shame, and our stubbornness. It was time to swallow that. This is about the right time for an exodus anyway, I figure, being six chapters from the end.

I patted down another armful of snow. That would be enough to shield Lucy from the elements. She hadn’t deserved this. She’d only come on this trip to try and win Michael back. She’d wanted to be a Cunningham. That was why she was here. Divorce or not, she was family, but we hadn’t treated her like it. We’d ignored her for the first half of the weekend. Then Audrey had let her take the blame for Michael’s death, loaded the guilt on her. And none of us had followed her to the roof. She had died alone. Some family. It’s hard to cry when tears freeze on your face.

Lucy’s hand stretched out from the snowdrift, palm to the sky, and I realised she was still wearing her wedding ring. I couldn’t decide whether it was more respectful to take it off and keep it, or to leave it on her. I decided I didn’t want to grapple with her frozen fingers, so I scooped a mound of snow over her hand. Then I took off my beanie, bracing against the chill that scraped my scalp, and stole an abandoned ski-pole leaning against the side of the lodge. I staked it on top of the snow, the beanie on top, so that we could find her again when the storm had passed.

‘We’ll come back and get you,’ I said to the mound. Someone put an arm around me, but in the wind, I didn’t even see who it was.

We all headed inside. I knew I’d have to go and get the bag of money from my chalet before we left, and I should have been thinking about how to get my mother alone to question her about the McAuleys, but at that moment I didn’t really care: I just wanted to leave. I needed to warm up, find another painkiller somewhere. I finally understood what it was like to be an addict; I would have given the whole bag of cash for something to dull my thoughts and my hand. I trudged after everyone else into the restaurant.