The electric light was dull in Diana’s room, but better than a candle in a bottle. I stood over her pillow and said her name but, true to form, she kept her eyes closed. Even when I spoke in her ear and jiggled her shoulder, she made no response. I was disappointed. All the way up the stairs I’d imagined something happening between us at last—some long-awaited communication; some last-minute understanding.

“Diana?”

I touched her hand, but there was no answering pressure.

“Wake up,” I pleaded. “I want to know about Stella. Cory can’t overhear us; it’s just me, just Freya.”

There was nothing in her face I was competent to read; nothing but a muscled tension that meant she was still alive. The dead wouldn’t hold their lips so taut.

I stood up straight and looked round the room: at the clutter of candles and pills and half-dead roses, and the dozens of papers she’d stuck to the walls. Handprints! C. Byrne, Class 1b, and to the left of that A portrait of my mother in charcoal, Dec. 2006, and above that Mum, 5/12/03. In and among the drawings there were certificates—This is to certify that Cory Byrne was examined in Grade 4 guitar and passed with merit. Summer term, 2001—and photos: a grinning, gap-toothed little Cory sitting astride a branch of the cedar tree, an unsmiling teenager in school blazer and tie. Cory as a baby, Cory as a toddler, Cory, Cory, Cory . . .

I lifted the edge of a pencil sketch to look at the photograph half hidden beneath, and for a second I didn’t move. I felt nothing. Then I ripped the sketch off its Blu-Tack dots and let it fall.

“There,” I said triumphantly, although I was really afraid.

I hadn’t seen that photo in years—it had disappeared from the mantelpiece when Stella died—but I recognised the horse chestnut tree, the big glass building in the background, and the tiers of matriculating students.

Gainsborough Art College, 2008. Same tree, same building, same year, same people, with Cory Byrne smack in the middle of the front row and my sister Stella behind him.

“What do I do now?”

Run away was the most obvious answer—that’s why I’d grabbed my bag from the studio and made it halfway to the front door. Cory was definitely still in bed, definitely still asleep, and this time I knew my way out. Yet here I was, sitting on the stairs, tearing at my hair and whispering, “What do I do?”

Was I asking myself? Or was I asking Byrne Hall? Cory said his mother talked to the house, and he’d meant it as a mark of her madness, but it was starting to make sense to me. Byrne Hall had a listening, whispering air. It was never bored, or distracted, or unconscious.