“Wine? Beer?” he says, neutral as ever.

“I’ll stick with water.” I help myself to a glass.

Curtis nods at the mushrooms. “Chop them, could you?”

I search for a knife. “On the mountain earlier. When you chased me and Saskia down the slope. You looked rattled.”

He shifts his feet.

“Why?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. But maybe . . . Now that we’re in the lead-up to the Brits, it might be better not to ride with her. Just in case.”

I laugh uncertainly. “Why? What else do you think she’s going to do?”

He stares down at the pizzas, clearly mega-uncomfortable with the topic of conversation.

I remember something. “The safety bar.”

Curtis’s head jerks up.

A chill passes through me. “You don’t think she would . . .”

When you spend as much time sitting on chairlifts as we do, you don’t always bother to lower the safety bar. It’s no big deal. I’ve never even come close to falling from one. The seats tilt backward, so it would be almost impossible to fall.

Unless you were pushed.

“No,” Curtis says. “Of course not.”

But he clearly did think that. Or at least considered it a possibility.

I slice the mushrooms thinly. “Put it this way. I won’t be getting on any more chairlifts with your sister.”

We chop in silence. Is Curtis right? She kicked my board down a crevasse and her reckless behavior caused Jacinta’s accident. But would she really go that far? There were rocks below the lift. If I fell, I might have died.

Curtis’s phone rings. He checks the screen and frowns. “Hi. When? No, that’s right before the Burton US Open. They’ll have to send a photographer out here.”

He hangs up.

“Your agent?” I say.

“Yeah.” He looks really stressed.

“Hard being famous,” I tease.

He snatches the knife from my hand. “If you’re going to do it like that, we might as well eat frozen pizza.”

I look down at the mushrooms, with no idea what I did wrong.

Curtis opens the fridge, pulls out more mushrooms, and chops them in half so fast they fly into the air. “Like that. See? Otherwise they go floppy.”

“I’d rather have frozen pizza and do without the hassle.”

“Trust me, it’ll be worth it. Grab some basil, will you?”

I browse the little jars of dried herbs on the counter. Here we go. Basilic.

“Fresh!” he says in an exasperated tone.

I pull leaves from his basil plant and chop them. The smell fills the kitchen.

“Stop!” Curtis shouts.

“What now?”

“Never chop them. It ruins the flavor. Tear them.”

I slam the knife down. If we were together, I would tell you to shut up, shove you up against the wall, and kiss you. Or skip the wall and drag you straight upstairs.