“Yes, what’s the plan, Jamie?” I say, taking Carrie’s cue. Find a person to be, someone capable. Someone tough. Surely one of my splintered selves is up to the task. “Or should I say, little brother?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” says Carrie, again in her absurdly polite tone.

“Jamie has been getting a little genetic testing done. Apparently we’re siblings. Half siblings, anyway.”

“I don’t . . .” Carrie starts, but she trails off. She does understand. She’s worked it out.

“Surely you can see that this is over? You’re not really going to shoot all three of us, are you?” I ask him, aiming for a conversational tone. I don’t pull it off. There are cracks in my delivery.

“He isnae going to shoot you,” says Fiona. The certainty of her words is echoed in her pale, fiercely determined face. She wears the same expression as Callum when we climbed the stairs together to find the bones under Carrie’s bed. There’s a part of me that believes in her, that believes that she knows. I wish all of me could. “That isnae how this ends.”

Jamie laughs contemptuously. “Like you’d have a fucking clue. If you know so much about what’s coming, how have I been playing you for years? You cannae even tell what day it is tomorrow.” He nudges me with the gun, and my stomach feels extraordinarily, unforgivably vulnerable. Surely evolution should have put an armor plate there. How can there only be skin and muscle to protect my insides from a shotgun blast? “We’re in the back of beyond. I could shoot all three of you and hide your bodies and nobody would be any the wiser. There’s thousands of acres right outside; I could dump you just about anywhere. They didnae find our dad, did they, Ailsa?”

“We’d be missed,” Carrie says. She looks very young. Under her smudged eyeliner, she could be fifteen. “People would look for us.”

Missed. Carrie and Fiona would be missed, by the future they should have had, by each other most of all. I am not certain I would be missed.

“Or I could set it up like Fiona went nuts and killed the pair of you, then turned the gun on herself.” I look at him, trying to gauge how serious he is. Very, I think. He likes this plan. It tickles him. “Aye, that story everybody would buy. Maybe that’s the way to do it.”

The light in the center of the ceiling flickers. Fiona glances up at it thoughtfully. “You want to be careful, Jamie. I dinnae think it likes what you’re doing.” She looks at me with meaning. I don’t know what she’s trying to tell me.

“What?” he says irritably.

“The Manse,” she says. “You cannae feel it? It’s furious with you.”