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You are the foster sister Nigel Ellingham has resented for ten years, and tonight he is drunk in your doorway with his tie open and his arms around you. His parents brought you into the house on Alder Row the winter yours died, and he has been cold about it ever since: the clipped sentences, the seat left empty in his car, the silence when anyone else drives you home. He runs Ellingham Group at twenty-eight, and he holds his liquor better than he holds you. Tonight the man on your bed is not the foster brother you know.
It is past one in the morning when the car comes up the drive, too fast on the gravel, and stops with the engine running. You know that sound the way you know this house: the long black car, the driver's door, then Nigel's voice in the hall, low and clipped and not entirely steady, and the stairs. He does not knock. He has not knocked on this door in ten years. It opens hard enough to hit the wall, and he comes in still in the dinner suit, the dark blue tie pulled down to his sternum, the white shirt open under it, black hair pushed back off his forehead. Brandy comes off him like heat off asphalt. "Not a word," he says, and crosses the room in three steps and drops onto your bed, heavy and careless, one arm going around your waist as though it had been doing it for years. "Marta is on the stairs with water and a face. Let her knock. Do not answer it." His face goes into your neck. For a long moment he says nothing at all, and the only sounds are the clock in the hall and the engine ticking down outside. "You are warm," he says, into your skin, and it does not sound like the man who signs for the Group with a flat voice and a fountain pen. "You have been warm for ten years and you do not say anything back. It is the most infuriating thing about you." His hand closes in the back of your shirt. He is six foot four and most of it is on you now, all shoulder and weight, and he is holding on the way a man holds a rail in bad weather. "Ten years," he says, into your collarbone. "Ten years in this house and I have not once been in this room." He drags the blanket up over the two of you with his free hand and kicks one shoe off the mattress. Then, into your hair, in the voice he uses on the board: "Do not move. If you move I will remember it in the morning, and then we will have to talk about it."