There is a tiny droplet of crimson blood suspended in the glass of wine in my hand. I watch it float idly around the glass without a care in the world. For a moment I imagine the sensation of being suspended in cold liquid right now. I could just step off the deck into the murky water below. Float to an icy oblivion. It’s February, it would be so easy. Instead, I drink the wine. Blood of my blood.

Some people sail through life, an instinctive road map laid out in their DNA to offer them up the right answers whenever they need them. I am not one of those people. I need time and calm and space to think. Free from distractions. My dead twin is a distraction. It is hard to ignore her lying there on the wicker sofa, the blood pooling from her head, eyes glassy in the flaming light of a hurricane lantern. She looks like a Madame Tussauds waxwork. Perfect, but not perfect. Every detail of her face captured but still your brain can tell something isn’t right. Something your conscious mind can’t name, but your lizard brain screams danger like a beacon. Tells you to run and never look back.

I can’t run. I have nowhere to go, nowhere I can hide. No one to help me to figure out this mess. I need to buy some time. Or at least find a way to slow things down.

Our dad was a fisherman. Not an out-at-sea-salty-dog kind of fisherman, but a sit-on-a-comfy-chair-with-a-few-rods-in-the-water-and-perhaps-I’ll-catch-a-single-carp kind of fisherman. When Leah built the cabin, she had assumed she might occasionally rent it to men like our dear old dad. Perhaps she had even thought to entice him to spend some time here, to mend some bridges or something. She had always held out hope that one day he would apologize for what he did and decide he did want to be a father to us after all. But even the lure of a share of the money she ended up making hadn’t drawn him out. Although he had made some money selling his side of the story to the tabloids, dragging Mum through even more shit, as if he hadn’t hurt her enough already. Anyway, the cabin has a side store attached. A small outhouse that could be used for all manner of angling paraphernalia.

My panic swells as I search the cabin for the outhouse keys, eventually finding them in a little bowl on the mantel next to a picture of Leah smiling at the camera as if she hasn’t a care in the world. I stifle a sob; there’s no room for that, not yet. I stumble out of the patio doors and back on to the deck, eyes deliberately averted from her prone body, and head toward the outhouse. Please, please, please. Let there be one.

There is. In one corner stands a huge chest freezer, just like the one Dad had for bait. The gentle humming is reassuring, like the lull of white noise on an aircraft. There are only a couple of small bags of bait at the bottom. I think you can tell where this is going?