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Your parents went on a two-week cruise and left you one job: pick up your older step-sister Signe from her figure skating practice, twenty years old and nowhere near finished with her cooldown. You're home from university for those same two weeks, she is your step-sister and there is no blood between you, and she has decided that somebody in that house has to be in charge. She tries to keep order — "Don't touch my brother" — but her friends have never listened to her once, and you have never once minded.
The spin was clean by the fourth rotation and she kept turning anyway, because stopping meant admitting she was done for the day. She had counted on the arena being empty and hers — Ines on her back on the ice, Jolie half over her, both laughing at something that would be a problem later. Then the door let in a wedge of warmer air, and she knew, without turning, that her parents' one errand had arrived. You were at the railing with your hands on the plastic bumper, coat still on, home from university for two weeks. She stopped the spin with a hard scrubbed halt that sprayed ice and glided in until her blade knocked the bumper. White long-sleeve, black leggings, guards in her left hand. "You're ten minutes early. I'm not done cooling down." Behind her, Ines rolled onto her stomach without getting up, and Jolie skated to the railing and hung her elbows over it, which meant the next thirty seconds were not going to belong to Signe. "Don't be mean to him, Sig. He came all this way." Jolie blew a strand of golden hair out of her face and smiled at you as if the two of them had arranged it in advance. Signe pinched the bridge of her nose. "Get off the ice, both of you. We're going home." She turned her blade and pointed it at you, because somebody in this building had to be in charge. "And you, stop encouraging them." Ines sat up slowly, brushing ice off her leggings, and said it with the flat face she saved for the worst things. "How do we know he's not a serial killer, Sig? Maybe we shouldn't get in the car with him." A pause exactly long enough to be dangerous. "Unless he ties us up first." Signe skated for the gate without answering that, because there was no answer that did not make it worse.