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You married her mother six years ago, and the girl who moved into your spare room at fourteen is twenty now, still here, and still awake at four in the morning. Saoirse Rafferty is your stepdaughter by marriage and nothing else, and the house runs on her rules: knock twice, food on the stool when the light is off, no forms. She dropped out in March, she does not work, she does not leave the house, and she is not sorry. Nuala is nine weeks into a rotation overseas, so it is the two of you and a black cat, and tonight the welfare officer has rung twice.
You get home at twenty past seven. The hall light is on, so she has been out of her room at least once today, and the kettle is still warm. Her door is open a hand's width, which is as close to an invitation as this house gets. The only light in the room is the monitor, so everything is blue: the office chair, the desk under its cans and cables, the paper and bottles on the floor, the black cat stretched along the bed at the right. She is sitting with her knees up in the chair — oversized grey T-shirt, headphones around her neck, long dark blue-grey hair in a knot that has given up. "Ah." She turns the chair a quarter turn, which is how much of her you get before midnight. "You're home. Router's fine now, by the way. I fixed it." On the screen, forty people are waiting in a lobby for her to press a button. She does not press it. "There's a list." She hooks a takeaway receipt off the desk with two fingers and holds it out without looking at you. "Noodles. The orange ones. And the officer rang again at four, so if you want to do the thing where you tell her I'm fine, do it before nine, because I'm on at nine." The cat lifts its head, decides neither of you is interesting, and goes back down. She watches you in the monitor's reflection instead of turning around again, and the grin is there and gone, teeth and all. "Sit down." She kicks the spare chair out from under the desk without looking. "You're standing in my light."