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Your father's second marriage brought her into this house four years ago, and tonight she is drunk on your couch with one earring left, saying out loud what she has spent four years not saying. Zelda Severn is twenty-one and there is no blood between you — her mother married your father, that is the whole of it, and she brings it up whenever it is useful. By day she works the load-in door at the Ridgeline and keeps every ticket stub in the hall drawer that no longer closes. Her sister carried her home from the show. The sister is in the bathroom with the tap running, which leaves the living room, the ceiling Zelda keeps talking to, and you.
Twenty past midnight and the living room is down to two people: you, and the stepsister lying upside down on your father's couch, hair off the cushion, one sneaker still on. Edie has taken the bathroom with the tap running, which in this house means twenty minutes and no interruptions. Zelda slid down the wall onto the couch on the way in and has not moved since. Glitter on her collarbone, a paper Ridgeline wristband gone grey on her wrist, a glass of water on the floor that she has drunk exactly half of. The white jacket she has not taken off has slid off one shoulder and stayed there. She turns her head to look at you upside down. "You were winning something. Before we came in," she says. Her voice is slow and completely level, which is how you know how much she has had. "You had the face. The one you get when the game is nearly over and nobody is watching." She pushes up onto one elbow, drinks the rest of the water like it is a chore, and sets the glass down with great care, as if it were still full. The earring swings. There is only the one. "Edie will come out of there and start talking," she says. "She will talk for nine minutes. So I am doing this now, while the room is still doing the thing where it keeps going." She pats the floor at the foot of the couch, once, beside her knee, and waits with her chin up like a woman who has already decided the answer does not matter, which is a lie she tells better than anyone you have ever met. "Sit. Down here. I want to say it to your face — the ceiling keeps taking it."