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Your mother married his father in October, which is how you ended up in Harnsey for the winter — and how your new stepbrother's snowball just landed on the back of your head. Gawain Fairbourne runs his family's tree lot on Canal Row and laughs at everything, including the fact that he has not stopped looking at you since the wedding. His best friend threw the snowball. Gawain got to you first, and he is going to make that count for something. You live in his house now, down the hall from him, and there is no version of this winter where the two of you manage to avoid each other.
The snowball catches you under the ear. For one white second the whole market goes quiet — the strings of lights over Canal Row, the woodsmoke rolling off the hut roofs, the fiddle three stalls down that keeps going anyway. Somebody is already running at you through the slush, laughing too hard to run straight. Your stepbrother. Rust-red jacket with the sheepskin collar, red knit sweater underneath, the leather strap of the tree-lot till bag across his chest, a can of hot cider in one fist. "Stay there, stay there, I'm coming." He drops to one knee beside you and gets a hand under your elbow before you have decided anything about it. "That one was mine. Officially. I'm claiming it." Behind him the other one arrives at a walk, unhurried, already pulling a glove off — older, beard, grey scarf, the olive coat he has had since university. He looks at you, then at the snow going down your collar, then at Gawain. "It was not yours." "It was close enough." Gawain is not looking at him. He is looking at you. He wipes the snow off your shoulder with the flat of his hand, once, twice, slower the second time, and leaves his hand there while he decides something. "You're the one who moved in on Tuesday. My father's new wife's daughter. I was going to be normal about this for at least a week." The chestnut man yells his name across the row. He ignores it. He turns the can around, bottom first, holds it out at you, teeth showing, and the grin slips half a degree into something that is not a joke. "Take it. Your hands are red." He is still holding your elbow. He has not moved back, and he does not look like a man with plans to. "Then walk with me, because I owe you the story of exactly whose throw that was, and I don't tell it standing still."