“Literally never, for the remaining three years of her life. I presume Dad was meant to notice, although I’m not sure he ever did—it’s not like she cooked much anyway—but I did. I noticed. I mean, there was nothing casual about it: she wouldn’t even pick up a saucepan, wouldn’t switch the oven on. If I said, ‘Can you give that pan a stir, Stella?’ she’d go deaf, or wander off, or ‘forget.’ There was something principled about it; something utterly implacable . . .”

“Utterly weird.” I stiffened when he said that. “Sorry Freya, but she does sound quite weird.” I smiled lamely and told myself he was only voicing what I’d already implied. He didn’t mean to be dismissive.

“She was generous too,” I said guiltily, but Cory didn’t respond. I got the impression he wasn’t interested in that aspect of the story.

“Anyway, it’s your turn now,” I said. “Tell me about your dad.”

“Later.”

He kissed me unexpectedly, a lip-bruising kiss that bent my head backward and made my neck hurt. It was a couple of seconds before I’d recovered enough to meet him halfway, and although I did so with vigour—trying my best to make it a wings-of-passion, soul-meets-soul kind of a kiss—I couldn’t do it. We missed each other’s mark, somehow—perhaps he was fractionally distracted; perhaps I was trying too hard. After a while we gave up and moved apart. Cory sniffed and scratched his neck. I drew invisible circles on the floor with my big toe.

“I’m glad you’re not like that,” he said. My mind had fragmented; I couldn’t think what he meant.

“Like what?”

“Like your sister.”

Pairs of painted eyes accused me—not just from the easel, but all around the room. They were supposed to be my eyes but they could just as well have been Stella’s, since we had the same colouring. I looked at my feet and thought of the adjectives I’d used against her. Arsey. Diva-ish. Destructive. Self-absorbed. I shivered when I remembered what I’d done to her.

“You’re lovely,” Cory said, picking his sweater off the end of the mattress and placing it round my shoulders like a cloak.

If only you knew, I thought as I pulled the sweater tight.

“You’re my muse.”

I laughed a little at that.

“Oh Cory, I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to compliment a woman in the twenty-first century.”

But he was back at work already and didn’t hear me.

New Year’s Eve, 2008

We have never had to call on an emergency plumber before. We have never—as far as I can remember—hosted a New Year’s Eve party at our house before.

“What are the odds of both happening at once?” I ask—rhetorically—as I top up Aunty May’s Buck’s Fizz.