“What are you doing?”

Lily jumps around, her face flushed, eyes darting from left to right as if scrabbling to get her bearings. “Why are you creeping up on me like that?” she hisses at Jess in an angry whisper that does not sound like her usual voice.

“We’re not supposed to go in there this morning. We were told not to.”

It is true. Less than forty minutes earlier, over breakfast, Jess had asked if she could say goodbye to Zoe before she left for school, but her dad’s response had been one of those sighs that had gone on so long it had made Jess wish she’d never asked the question.

No, Zoe’s resting this morning. You had a lovely time reading to her last night, didn’t you? Just leave her be this morning, OK?

The way her dad had said it, Jess had known that, in spite of the upward inflection at the end of his sentence, he wasn’t really asking a question at all.

It was true that the previous evening Jess had spent a lovely time with Zoe. She had curled up in the double bed in the spare room where Zoe now slept, and read aloud the collections of poems they used to recite as little children—When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six—poems about beetles and bears and buttercup days that seemed to belong to a different, kinder world. Zoe had drifted in and out of sleep—she had done that a lot since she’d come home from the hospital—so Jess hadn’t been sure how much she’d actually heard, but that hadn’t mattered. She didn’t mind that Zoe’s room smelled a bit strange: a thick, sticky, sweet smell that clung to the hairs inside Jess’s nose and refused to be sniffed away. She just liked being close to her twin, cuddling up in bed together, just as they’d done every night before Zoe got ill.

“Do not tell Mum I was in there. I mean it, Jess. You don’t want to be a telltale.”

Lily’s voice is quiet but firm, full of anger and warning, and there is a look in her eyes that Jess recognizes from all the times she has caught Lily using the telephone when their mum has told her not to, or the afternoons she has seen Lily smoking with her friends behind the children’s playground in the park.

There is a moment of uncertainty, neither of them knowing what Jess’s next move will be. Until her left foot joins her right on the top stair, Jess isn’t sure what she’s going to do next either.

“I want to go in too.”

The two sisters glare at one another and Jess feels something pass between them: something unknowable yet frightening that she can’t, or daren’t, articulate.

“You are not to go in there, Jess. Do you hear me?”

Lily’s body blocks the door, her arm stretched behind her as if in the process of being arrested. Around the corner of Lily’s body, Jess can see her sister’s hand gripping the handle, a final barrier should Jess get that far.