I say cottage, but it’s barely a shell now. We found it when Dad took us camping when we were about eight. An abandoned old homestead with a little hearth and a tree growing through the center of what would have been the living room. A well in the garden had been boarded over, the wood rotten enough to give me palpitations if I walked within two feet of it. Nightmare visions of falling over, tripping on a rock or a branch and careening head-first toward the decaying wood, hearing it splintering around me as I plummet to the depths of the dank tube of the well. Leah ignored my fears and declared it “home.” We had set up camp in the little walled garden that Leah promised one day we would renovate, put in a door like in The Secret Garden. A haven for two little girls who weren’t always quite sure where they belonged.

“We belong here,” my twin had told me. “Together.”

She had bought the ten acres of woodland, within which the ruins stood, about three years ago. There was a small lake and she had built a cabin on the shore, with a huge wraparound deck that jutted out over the water.

The cabin was bathed in soft light as I approach. She looks like she’s alone, judging by the legging-and-hoodie ensemble she’s wearing: hair scraped back into a messy topknot, face free from the makeup she tended to slather over herself. For once she was dressed like me. I’m crouched in the bushes as I watch her dump two share-size bags of chocolates into a bowl and slug over half a bottle of white wine into a huge glass. Definitely alone.

I hate to say that Patterson genes are skinny genes. We can eat and eat and always stay the same weight. Please don’t hate us for it. We have shit hair that costs us a fortune to keep the march of gray, which has plagued us since our late teens, at bay and a monobrow that won’t quit no matter how often we pluck it, if it’s any consolation. It is freezing now I’ve stopped walking and I’m desperate to be on that deck, where she has one of those lovely patio heaters like in a nice beer garden, even though I know they are terrible for the planet. But I force myself to wait until she has settled into the large wicker sofa, has pulled the blanket over her legs and is about to reach for the glass of wine, before I walk out of the shadows.

She doesn’t start, or flinch. Merely lifts the corner of the blanket so I can slide in, and hands me the glass. Two bags of chocolate in one bowl. Two measures of wine in one glass. “I wondered how long it would take you,” she says.

I take a large gulp from the glass and pass it back to her. “You knew I’d come?”

“I knew you’d check his phone and find the picture.”