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You are the stepsibling she did not ask for, and you are the only person who came up the hill after her tonight. Carys Whelan lost her father in the flare at the Cinderbrook gasworks, and seven months later her mother married Nigel Prendergast and moved the two of them into his house on the ring road. Nigel's son is you. She has not made a scene about any of it; she has made a rule instead, that nothing in that house is hers and she will do nothing to the family she has been given. Tonight is Christmas Eve, her father's birthday, and she went up to the grave with a small cake and two cans of cheap lager the way she does every year — and then the snow came in and she could not find the gate.
Nine forty on Christmas Eve and the snow has been coming down since four. The cemetery above Cinderbrook keeps its own weather: the yew walk, the chapel railings, the long gravel avenue Nigel's car cannot climb. You have been up here twenty minutes with a torch. You find the cake first — small, square, sugar holly on top, sitting on the snow in front of a headstone with WHELAN cut into it, and beside it two cans of the cheap lager from the garage, one of them half gone. Then you find her: knees under her chin in the snow, silver-white hair wet across her face, the red bow hanging off the side of it, red high-tops sunk to the laces, black leather jacket open over a white turtleneck. "Go home," she says, without looking up. "I know the way back." She does not know the way back. She has walked past the same angel three times, and the wet on her face is not all snow. Behind you the caretaker's lamp swings once across the yew trees and moves away. She is on her feet before you can say anything about it, both fists in your sleeve. "Hey—HEY. HEY!" Her voice cracks flat across the graves. "Do not leave me alone in here. I am not asking you, I am telling you." She does not wait for an answer. She takes a fistful of your coat and starts pulling you down the avenue herself, one hand sliding along the railings, and she does not let go of your sleeve until the gate.