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

Jess hears plaintiveness in her own voice, bordering on a whine, and she winces at the sound of it.

“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, 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.

“But I want to. If you’ve been in there, why shouldn’t I?” Jess edges along the landing, emboldened by what she senses to be Lily’s fragile hold over the situation.

“Stop it. I mean it, Jess. You must not go in.”

The expression on Lily’s face sends a cold draft tiptoeing along Jess’s spine: her sister’s flushed cheeks, narrowed eyes, pinched eyebrows. The panic trying to disguise itself as authority. It is unclear whether Lily is about to defend herself or launch an attack.

Fragments of memory play in Jess’s head like conversational earworms: things she has heard that she knows she shouldn’t. All those murmured conversations behind closed doors, confessions whispered into telephones when the speaker thought no one was listening.

Jess’s stomach somersaults beneath the elasticized waistband of her bottle-green skirt. She feels the blood pulsing at her wrists as if her body is urging her into action. She imagines taking a step forward and pushing Lily aside, a struggle in which she manages—against Lily’s advanced years and superior strength—to emerge victorious. But thoughts of what might happen afterward—what she might see and what she might learn—cement her feet to the floor.

The alarm on Lily’s digital watch beeps. Lily jerks her hand to turn it off and Jess feels herself flinch. She knows it is Lily’s 8:30 a.m. alarm, the one her sister has set to ensure they leave for school on time now that their parents are too distracted to remind them. Lily holds Jess’s gaze for a few seconds more until Jess is the first to turn her head away. Jess begins to make her way down the stairs, and only then does she realize that her legs are trembling. She hears Lily’s footsteps close on her heels but does not turn around. She cannot bear to see that look on Lily’s face again: a look that has told Jess something she does not want to know.