“We’ve hardly talked at all,” I protest. “It’s just been you stomping about and acting weird.”

“I’m going downstairs,” she says.

I click my lamp on and swing my legs out of bed.

“Oh, no, no, no,” says Stella. “You’re staying here. There’s no need for a delegation.”

I don’t argue—you don’t argue with Stella when she’s in certain moods—and she pats me on the head. There are goose pimples all over her arms and legs, and across the top of her breasts, but she shakes her head when I offer her my dressing gown.

When she’s gone, I get out of bed to collect up my papers, and I keep popping onto the landing to listen. I can’t hear anything. As I’m picking up the last sheet, Stella comes traipsing back upstairs to my room.

“That was quick,” I say. “Is he all right? Is he asleep?”

She shrugs, pulling at her lower lip, and ambles over to the window. We can hear the rain blowing against the glass.

“It’s cold,” says Stella, as if she’s only just noticed.

She climbs into my bed without asking, and we sleep back to back for warmth. At first I assume she’s here because she wants to talk, but she doesn’t say anything—not even goodnight.

I feel cold, pressed up against the wall; we’re too big to fit comfortably in a single bed. I’d planned to lie on my back with my hands behind my head and think about Tom on the sofa downstairs. Nothing sensational was going to happen in my going-to-sleep dream: I was just going to ask Tom if he would like a book, and he was going to thank me for my discernment and say that a book was exactly what he would like, after which we’d have a conversation, ostensibly about reading, in which everything we said—and didn’t say—shimmered with erotic subtext.

A Tom-themed going-to-sleep fantasy is impossible with Stella in my bed, however, and it isn’t just a question of physical space. Everything my sister sets her heart on becomes hers; she even has a monopoly on dreams.

Of course, she would protest that this is nonsense—that it’s all in my head—but so what if it is? It comes to the same thing in the end.

7

Cory and I parted in the early hours and I sat alone in my room, at the foot of the four-poster bed. I picked up my phone and began a new message—Hi Tom—but there was too much to say, and I couldn’t think it through in a text; it would be better to write in longhand. I found a pen at the bottom of my bag and tore some pages from one of my notebooks.

While I was thinking what to write, I rested my chin on my knees and looked out of the window. Sea and sky were still dark, but a silver fissure was beginning to grow along the line where they met. What a picture of calm, I thought, with the slightest of smiles. My body was weightless, as if the blood and bone had dissolved and been replaced with light and air. If I’d cut my finger just then I swear it wouldn’t have bled; it would have oozed a pearly translucence to match the streak of dawn on the water.