The anxious knot in my stomach grows as I wait at the bus stop and it passes nine o’clock. There are going to be twenty-three teenagers waiting at school for their English lesson and I’m still fifteen minutes away. I’ve already had one verbal warning; this time it’s going to be a written one, a permanent warning on my record. I’m tempted to call in sick, pretend I was too ill to phone earlier, but I’ve already done that twice this term. Two missed days, three late days in less than half a term. I can’t lose this job. I can’t.

The bus comes and, despite my anxiety, I’m tempted to let it drive by. Same route to work, same walk at the other end. Every day, the same. I get this urge every so often to get on a different bus, ride it to the end of the route and see where I end up. Walk away from the school and the sick feeling I get in my gut when I sit in front of my first class, feeling like a fraud. What am I doing? That’s what I think on those days.

On the bus, I close my eyes and feel myself drifting, jerking awake with a start as my phone starts ringing at the bottom of my bag, a harsh interruption that has my fellow passengers staring at me. I fumble for it, hunched over, pausing before answering when I see it’s my dad.

“Tess?” His voice is faint, muffled.

“What’s wrong, Dad?” I know he’s not ringing for a casual chat. That’s our Sunday-night routine, ten minutes of talking where we fill the silence but say nothing at all.

“It’s…Julia. She’s home.”

There’s too long a silence as my brain scrabbles to make sense of his words. “Home? She’s better?”

His turn for silence. “No…there’s nothing more they can do. She wants to die at home.”

Breath gone, I lean back in the seat. It shouldn’t be a shock. Julia has been slowly dying for the past year. I’ve seen it on my too-infrequent visits to see her in the hospital. Less Julia, more shadow each time. But still…had I thought she would go on fighting forever? Maybe I had—she’s always been so bright and alive. All my most vivid memories of her from the beginning are of her bringing our house back to life—against our will at first. Well, mine and Bella’s at least. The three of us, after my mother died, were drifting along living a half-life, then along came Julia, so vibrant, a whirl of glaring color impossible to ignore or freeze out and, God, Bella and I resented that. We were so horribly hostile toward her at the beginning, but she never gave up trying, our so very not-wicked stepmother.

“Will you come home?”