“It’s not fair Alex is dealing with all of this, either.”
“No, it isn’t.” I have a hundred questions. About Alex as a child, about life when their father was still at home, about how he’s really been these past few months. None of them are fair to ask a sixteen-year-old trying to navigate one of the most difficult weeks of her life.
“Ugh. What are we doing?” Mia asks. “We’ve gone straight to miserable talk. We should get up and be positive. There are blueberry muffins downstairs. And it’s risotto for dinner.Andthere’s ice cream in the freezer. I made it.”
I stand up, pulling on Alex’s Sorrowsong Rugby hoodie. I’d kill to see him back there, playing beside Vincenzo. “You can make ice cream?”
“It’s really good, if I do say so myself.”
From the top of the stairs, I can already hear the buzz of life downstairs. Ingrid’s voice, but someone else’s, too. A man’s. And lots of laughter, despite the situation.
It’s a home. It’s a home and a family and it’s a sink full of dishes and walls that aren’t cold the whole way through.
I will myself not to get emotional. But itisemotional. Whatever this is, here in this house, it’s the opposite of loneliness. “Sounds busy,” I say, nervously.
“You come from a small family, right?”
I stutter, like I always do whenever I talk about my family, stuck somewhere in that horrible space betweenisandwas. “Yeah. Well, it’s just me now. Just me at home … um … but there was three of us. But no, I’ve never had a big family.”
She flushes, like she’s cursing herself for asking me that. “Shit, Ophelia. That was careless of me.”
“No, no. It’s fine. Really, it is.”
“If you’re overstimulated, you can just have a moment in Alex’s room.”
“Sounds perfect.”
I reach the bottom of the stairs, and a girl I recognize as Josie flies round the kitchen doorway like she’s been watching the stairs, waiting for me.
“Pheelz!”
I laugh, accepting her impressively forceful hug. “Pheelz? Did Vincenzo put you up to that?”
“Yeah.” She squeezes me again. “Alex told me not to scare you away.”
I hug her back, nose in her blond waves. “He did? We can’t keep letting him get away with these comments.”
“Let’s take him down!”
“Deal.”
She drags me into the kitchen, where I see Evie—who looks exactly like her twin sister but with lighter hair—Éléanor, who is twelve and the shiest of them all, and Charlotte, who, at ten years old, gave me the most efficient, businesslike handshake I’ve ever received. Ingrid is here, too, and a gray-haired man I’m assuming is her husband. There’s another man, too, in a white chef’s jacket. It really is chaos. Several versions of my name are cheered, each of the sisters enveloping me in a warm hug. Evie holds on to me an extra second. “I feel like I know you already; we’ve heard so much about you.”
“Oh no. I don’t want to know.”
She laughs, placing a drink in my hand. “All good things!”
Everyone is in good spirits, but they all look so tired. I don’t know how they’re all doing it.
But as the evening rolls on, I start to understand it a little more. They all lean on each other. Everyone is involved, everyone is included. When someone seems down, everyone rallies around them, even Ingrid, who seems to love Elise as if she were a sister.
And even though Alex isn’t here to guide me through it, I feel totally okay.Welcome.
But one absence is nibbling away at my conscience. I nudge Mia as we start pulling pasta bowls and glasses out of cupboards for dinner. “Where’s Fleur?”
“I’m not sure. Probably in her room.”
“Is that because of me?”
