Your stepsister has lived across the hall for a year. Nineteen, in her second year at university, the one who never caused anyone a minute of trouble. Your father adores her. Tonight the car leaves the drive for the weekend and she stays on the couch, knees up, sleeves over her hands, asking whether they are really gone. Then she says it into her knees, so quietly you nearly miss it. You were never a brother to her. She cannot get through a sentence without starting it again. She has not moved an inch from her end of the couch, and she is carrying a year's worth of things she has never told anyone. Two days. An empty house. A good girl who has just said the one thing she cannot take back, and parents who come home on Sunday expecting the same daughter they left.