“I don’t understand why the doctors can’t do more for her. It’s inhumane. For goodness’ sake, people do more for sick pets than they do for people. There must be something we can do. Please, Mum. Please, Dad. Please stop it. You have to. Please.”

Lily is still crying—loud, heaving sobs—and Jess imagines her mum folding Lily into her arms, stroking her hair, kissing her forehead.

“I wish it could all be over.”

“Don’t you dare say that, Lily. Don’t ever let me hear you say that again.” Her dad’s voice is sharp, as though you might cut yourself on it if you dared say more. It is a voice he uses only rarely—not a voice Jess remembers him using at all before Zoe got ill—and the sound of it reduces Lily’s sobs to a gentle whimper. Jess does not know why but something in Lily’s voice has caused the muscles in her tummy to coil like snakes. She replays Lily’s lines over in her head but cannot make sense of her feelings: Jess also wants Zoe’s illness to be over, wishes more than anything that her sister could get better, yet something about the way Lily said it, and her dad’s furious reply, will not sit comfortably in her head.

And then Jess hears the click of the kitchen door. She jumps to her feet, skitters noiselessly across the hall to the sitting room, and picks up a copy of Anne of Green Gables, ready to pretend she has been reading all along.

She does not yet know it but what she has just heard is a conversation she will remember verbatim for the rest of her life, the words replaying in her head on a never-ending loop.

It is eleven days since Jess overheard Lily crying with her mum and dad, wishing they could do something to stop Zoe’s suffering, wishing it could all be over.

She doesn’t know on this otherwise innocuous Thursday morning—unremarkable except that it is now exactly two weeks since Zoe came home from the hospital—what compels her to walk up the stairs. There is no need for her to do anything except put on her shoes and wait for Lily to come down. She has already brushed her teeth, pulled her hair into some semblance of a ponytail, packed her schoolbag. And yet she continues putting one foot higher than the other, climbing toward a future she cannot possibly predict.

Many years later she will come to believe that somehow she knew, somehow she guessed what was about to happen—what had already happened, too late for an intervention—an inexplicable sisterly intuition compelling her to investigate.

As she reaches the top of the stairs, Lily is coming out of Zoe’s bedroom. Her back is turned to Jess and she closes the door quietly, reverentially almost, her hands clasped around the handle. Jess watches her take in a long, deep breath that she seems to keep in her chest for an impossible length of time, as though perhaps if her lungs hold on to it for long enough, eventually she will be elevated like a balloon and fly away to some happier place.