He smiles, laughs. “Seriously? That was my mother’s deathbed confession that’s had you in such a spin? What—I suppose she made out I was this shady figure tempting precious Bella to the dark side. It’s a joke—half of what we took came from Bella, not me.” He shakes his head. “Have you any idea how weird you’ve been acting? Lena’s convinced you’re the one on drugs.”

I wince. I’ve barely spoken to anyone but Dad in the five days since Julia died. I left a message for Sophie when I knew she’d be at work and haven’t taken any of her calls since. I’ve thrown everything into helping Dad arrange the funeral and avoiding everyone else. I thought I had it together, concentrating hard enough on the little tasks to mask my exhaustion. I thought maybe I’d sleep after Julia died, but instead the insomnia is getting worse and I still haven’t found the missing sleeping pills. There’s too much happening in my head—every time I close my eyes, all the bad things go skittering through my mind, like monsters released from cages. In the day, I can keep those cages locked, but at night…

“Stop trying to make out that it was nothing—you were Bella’s boyfriend when she died. Her bloody drug dealer. You were with her that night. She kept you secret. Don’t try to make out that it’s not significant.”

“I wasn’t her boyfriend,” he says, smile all gone, taking a step closer to me. “We were having sex, that’s all. And I wasn’t the only one. Come on, Tess, you are not that naïve, not that obsessed still with pretending she was some perfect princess. I was not the only one she was sleeping with. I wasn’t even the only one at the bloody wedding she’d slept with. Do not try to turn this into something the day before my mother’s funeral.”

I step away from him, poised to run. “Scared I’ll go to the police and they’ll start looking a bit harder at you?”

He smiles again, faintly. “No, just warning you. What do you think I’ll tell the police if you send them my way? I’ll tell them all the stories about Bella they won’t have heard before. And they’ll pass those stories on to Leo. Do you think your father wants to hear the police telling him what a little druggy slut his dead daughter was?”

My hand flies back to slap him, but he catches my wrist, squeezes it until I gasp.

“Leave it alone. Leave your dead sister to sleep.” He lets go of my wrist and marches away.

“And what about your dead sister?” I call after him. “The one you killed?”

He turns back and stares at me, white-faced.