All the way down, Jess contemplates finding her mum, telling her where Lily has been, what she thinks has taken place inside that bedroom. But by the time Jess reaches the bottom stair, she knows she cannot. To tell her mum would be to voice suspicions Jess is not yet ready to assert, things she does not, at the age of ten, have the courage to say out loud.

Jess can barely breathe as she opens the front door. She has passed the day in a trance, the fear of what she might discover when she gets home churning in her stomach. As she walks through the door, anxiety scratches at her skin.

Stepping into the hallway, there is a stillness, as though her entry has disrupted the most delicate of equilibriums. She stops and listens, and it is then that she hears the noise that causes her heart to drum in her chest.

It is the sound of her mum crying. Not the quiet, muffled sobs Jess has become accustomed to in recent months, but noisy, uninhibited, primitive cries.

And in those few, potent seconds between entering the house and her dad opening the sitting room door and ushering her inside, Jess experiences a moment of clarity she has never known before.

She knows, immediately, that Zoe is dead. She knows that what she saw this morning—Lily standing outside Zoe’s door, face flushed with guilt, hands clutching the door handle, refusing Jess entry as if her innocence depended on it—was the aftermath of something so awful that to think about it makes Jess feel as though her heart is being clamped in a vise. She knows, as she enters the sitting room and falls into her mum’s arms, that in spite of the way her mum holds her tightly, rocks her back and forth, says I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, over and over again, it is not her mum or her dad or even leukemia that is to blame for Zoe’s death. It is Lily.

What Jess understands as she cocoons herself inside her mum’s embrace—as hot, fat tears stream down her cheeks—is that she has lost not one sister today but two. She has lost the twin with whom her life has been inextricably linked since before they were born. Without her, Jess knows she will never feel complete again. But as grief squeezes her throat and blood pounds in her ears, she understands that Zoe is not the only sister she has lost today. She knows that she will never forgive Lily for what she has done. As of today, she is not one of three siblings but an only child.

The remainder of the afternoon passes in a blur and yet, in years to come, Jess will remember fragments of it in such microscopic detail it is as though her brain had been set on automatic timer, capturing individual frames at regular intervals: sitting next to Lily on the dusky pink sofa in the sitting room, flinching every time Lily tries to touch her, speak to her, catch her eye; the sound of murmured voices from the kitchen below rising up through the floorboards like audible phantoms, conversations Jess wants to be neither a part of nor excluded from; the front door opening and closing, anonymous footsteps padding along the hallway, some heading upstairs, others down; Mrs. Sheppard popping her permed head around the sitting room door, exchanging silent communications with Lily that Jess is on the verge of being able to decipher but cannot yet decode; Lily trying to comfort her when all Jess wants is to shout at her: I know what you did and I will never, ever forgive you.