I get up and pull on leggings and sneakers, zip up a fleece hoodie. I can’t stay indoors listening to the house get quiet as everybody else falls asleep. My mind gets too busy, sends creeping thoughts down unwanted corridors, asking what if and why and when…thoughts of death and blood and ghosts. And bones. God, bones…

Neither Jack nor Sean said anything when they came back from the police station and all our questions are hovering unspoken, thick and heavy in the cold air. I hear them as whispers in the night. Who is it? Who is it? Whose bones are they?

I tiptoe across the landing and almost scream, hands over my mouth as the bathroom door opens and Sean steps out, rubbing his hair with a towel. I take a step back toward my room but it’s too late, he’s seen me.

“Is Julia…?”

I shake my head.

He looks at me. “Where are you going?”

“Out for a run. I couldn’t sleep. I was restless.”

He sighs. “Same here. I can’t stop thinking about the police swarming all over Dean House. Want some company?”

Not you, I want to say, but the presence of his dying mother in the house stops the words from coming out. And also…he looks so sad. He looks lost, shoulders slumped, eyes tired and shadowed.

“I prefer to run alone,” I say instead.

He cocks his head. “At ten at night?”

I shrug. I’ve run later than this. Not here, though.

We both pause by Julia’s room. “How was she when you saw her?” I ask. It’s not really what I’m asking. I’m asking if he and Jack have made things worse. If they took their hostility and anger and stories of buried bones into their dying mother’s room.

“We didn’t scream recriminations and throw things,” he says with a ghost of a smile. He knows what I’m asking.

The landing feels too small with both of us here. The house feels too small. It always did, when they were in the house. I wasn’t running back then, but I used to spend more time out of the house than in it while they were here. Even now, I feel as awkward and self-conscious as I did at sixteen in his presence. I turn away, eager to leave before the walls close in even more, and his voice stops me.

“Do you think she ever knew what her leaving did to us?” he asks.

I hesitate. Do I tell him I tried not to think about it? Tried never to think about them? “Yes. I do. Sometimes…she used to cry.”

“But was it for me and Jack, do you think? Or for Ellie?”

“I don’t know. I never asked.”