‘So go.’

‘You know that’s not fair. We can’t leave you here. What if the storm gets worse? Your family’s in danger. People are dying.’

‘It sounds to me like you’ll be taking the killer down the mountain with you. I’m not leaving Michael here to rot.’

‘We’ll come back and get him when we’re safe, when the weather’s settled.’

Marcelo hovered behind us, assumedly having already tried most of Katherine’s arguments himself. Katherine was getting more frustrated, her voice rising in pitch, leaving behind the rational arguments and pulling out words like selfish and difficult and silly woman while yanking at the bedpost to see if it came apart at the joints. In normal circumstances, calling my mother a ‘right bitch’ would have been cataclysmic, but Audrey simply turned her head. From the grimace on Marcelo’s face, he’d tried that approach too.

‘I need a screwdriver or, hang on’—she squinted at the frame— ‘an allen key,’ Katherine said to Marcelo, turning from the bedpost, disgusted. ‘Four hundred bucks a night and it’s IKEA.’ Then to Audrey, a threat: ‘We’ll carry you out of here.’

Marcelo, glad of the escape, left to find the tool.

‘My son is dead,’ was all Audrey said. ‘I won’t leave him.’

That it was the same thing she’d said in the bar, when Sofia and Crawford had been explaining the murder, made me snap. I’d begged to be considered a real Cunningham since we’d got here. I’d cared more about that than Green Boots, than Michael even. Finding the killer was not about justice: it was a chance to prove myself, a sycophantic appeal to my mother that I was worthy of my own name. But my mother, in her oft-repeated distress over Michael’s death, didn’t even consider that there was a woman, dead in the snow outside, who was a part of this family too. Regardless of names or divorce contracts, Marcelo had acknowledged that: it’s all of us or none of us. My mother, for all her insistence, didn’t know what family meant.

‘Your son?’ I shocked Audrey and Katherine by yelling. Marcelo told me later he’d heard me down the hall. My anger was more pent up than I’d realised. ‘Your son? How about my sister – your daughter. In-law’s just a word. You know Lucy’s outside in the snow? You know that she died because of how you made her feel. Because of how you loaded her up with guilt over Michael’s death. She’s dead the same as he is, and all you can say is your son.’

‘Ern.’ Katherine tried to step in front of me, but I was advancing on my mother, incensed. My mother, for her part, didn’t flinch.