Marla’s house is not ostentatious. It is tasteful.

Tasteful stone steps. Tasteful brass knocker. Tasteful greenery that never seems to wilt, even in December when everything else on the street looks faintly exhausted. The house sits on a quiet, tree-lined road in west London where the pavements are always clean in a way that says someone else is responsible for the mess of living. The taxi pulls away before she’s even fully closed the door. For a moment she just stands there with her suitcase handle in hand, looking up at the familiar facade. Home always feels slightly unreal after term time, as though it belongs to someone who resembles her rather than to her directly.

She presses the bell.

The door opens almost immediately.

Her mother does not hug her at once. She never does. She steps back first, takes her in from head to toe: hair, posture, the faint smudge of eyeliner she didn’t quite manage to remove on the train.

“You look tired,” her mother says.

“Hello to you too,” Marla replies lightly.

Then her mother does hug her, brief and cool, one hand resting carefully between her shoulder blades as though mindful of creasing the blazer. She smells of expensive hand cream and the faintest trace of jasmine perfume.

“Come in, darling. You’ve grown thinner.”

“I haven’t.”

“You always say that.”

Inside, the house is warm. Everything has a place, and everything is in it. The hall table holds a neat stack of post, a bowl of keys, a single arrangement of white lilies. Marla drops her bag at the foot of the stairs and immediately feels twelve years old again for doing so.

“Shoes,” her mother says automatically.

Marla slips them off.

From the sitting room, her father calls, “Is that our prodigal Head Girl?”

“In the flesh,” she replies, stepping in. Year Twelve has been an ordeal, but the knowledge that next year, she will overtake the brash, bold, ostentatious Ciara Andrews fills her with a sort of pride that she does not yet name. Next year will be her making.

He is exactly as she left him: reading glasses low on his nose, newspaper folded with surgical precision, a mug of coffee gone cold on the side table.

“Good term?” he asks.

“Busy.”

“Busy is good.”

“It usually is.”

He kisses her cheek, a little awkwardly, as if she might still be small enough to lift. He never quite knows what to do with the fact that she isn’t.

“You’ll want lunch,” her mother says, already turning toward the kitchen. “Cook’s made something light.”

"Mandy's still here?"

Her mother doesn't laugh as much as breathe, incredulity coming quietly. "She doesn't break for Christmas for a good few weeks yet, Marla."

Marla follows, the familiar choreography of return settling over her. Kitchen island. A plate already waiting as though she had been expected down to the minute: grilled chicken, salad, something green she doesn’t question. She eats neatly. She always has.

“So,” her mother says, pouring water into a glass. “You’ve been very quiet on the phone.”

“Have I?”

“Mm.”

Marla shrugs. “School’s just… a lot at the moment.”

Her father glances up from slicing bread. “Exams?”

“Not yet.”

“Drama, then,” he says, almost amused.

She smiles, because that is the expected response.

“Something like that.”

They let it drop. They always do. In this house, concern manifests as logistics: Have you eaten? Do you need new shoes? Shall we arrange a tutor?

Emotions are considered slightly vulgar if handled directly.

Halfway through the meal, her mother says casually, “Your aunt is coming for dinner tonight.”

Marla’s fork pauses just slightly above her plate.

“Oh,” she says. “Is she?”

“Yes. She’s back from Geneva and insists she hasn’t seen you in months.”

It has been seven weeks.

“Of course she does,” Marla says. "We're seeing her at Christmas. Can she not wait a week or two?"

Aunt Lillian has a presence that fills rooms before she enters them. Wealthier, sharper, infinitely more direct than her mother, she speaks to Marla as though she were an equal rather than a project. When Marla was younger, this felt like freedom. Now it feels more like scrutiny dressed up in admiration.

“You should change before she arrives,” her mother adds. “Something less… school.”

Marla glances down at her uniform. The crest on the blazer seems to stare back at her, accusatory and proud all at once.

“I’ll go up,” she says.

Her room is exactly as she left it at half term. Bed made. Desk cleared. Books arranged by subject rather than size. The window overlooks the garden, where the lawn is trimmed into obedience and the hedges stand in straight, unwavering lines.

She sets her suitcase on the stand and doesn’t open it straight away.

Instead, she sits on the edge of the bed.

Home is quiet in a different way than school. Not the charged quiet of corridors and chapels and unsaid things. A padded quiet. A safe one. The sort of quiet that assumes nothing truly terrible will happen here because terrible things do not happen in houses with good insulation and monitored alarm systems.

Her phone buzzes.

A message from Julian:
You home?

She types back:
Yes. It’s weird.

He replies almost instantly:
Weird good or weird bad?

Marla looks around the room — at the framed photos, the carefully chosen curtains, the life that feels both hers and not entirely hers.

Weird quiet, she writes.

There is a pause before his three dots appear again.

You deserve quiet, he sends.

She doesn’t answer that.

Downstairs, the front door opens again sometime after seven. Her aunt’s voice carries up the staircase, warm and commanding all at once.

“Where is she? Has she hidden already? I refuse to believe my favourite niece has become boring.”

Marla smooths her skirt, checks her reflection, and goes down.

Her aunt kisses both her cheeks, holding her at arm’s length afterward.

“My God,” she says approvingly. “You look formidable.”

“Hello to you too.”

“Come here properly.” This time the hug is firm, unapologetic, almost possessive. “How is my future Head Girl? Still terrifying your teachers?”

“I’m trying not to.”

“Don’t try too hard,” her aunt replies briskly. “It never helped me.”

Dinner is louder than usual. Her aunt dominates the conversation, asking sharp questions about school politics, prefect elections, chapel duties — things her parents usually treat as polite background noise.

“And how does it feel,” her aunt asks at one point, swirling her wine, “to be so relied upon all the time?”

Marla blinks. “I’m not—”

“Oh, don’t be modest. Girls like you always are.”

Her mother gives a small, warning smile. “Let her eat.”

“No, I’m interested,” her aunt insists. “Leadership suits you. It always has. Even when you were little, you used to organise the other children into those silly games they didn’t want to play but followed anyway.”

Marla laughs, but it comes out thin.

“I don’t think they followed,” she says. “I think they just didn’t argue.”

“Exactly,” her aunt replies.

Later, when the dishes are cleared and her parents retreat to the sitting room, her aunt lingers at the table with her, over coffee and biscuits.

“You’re pale,” she says quietly, all the performance gone.

“I’m fine.”

“Mm.”

Her aunt studies her in that uncomfortably precise way she has, as though measuring not just what Marla is but what she could become.

“You don’t have to be extraordinary all the time, you know,” she says.

Marla’s throat tightens unexpectedly.

“I know.”

“You say that,” her aunt replies, “but you’ve never actually believed it.”

There is no accusation in her tone. Only certainty.

Marla looks down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap. They are steady. They always are.

“It’s just school,” she says again, softer this time. “It’ll calm down.”

Her aunt does not contradict her.

But she doesn’t agree either.

When Marla goes to bed that night, the house is silent, insulated, perfectly secure. She lies beneath her duvet, staring at the familiar ceiling moulding, waiting for sleep to come easily the way it used to when she was younger and the world felt smaller.

It doesn’t.

Somewhere, deep in the quiet, she thinks she hears a faint hum — not real, surely not real — a memory of sound rather than the thing itself.

She presses her eyes shut.

Home is safe, she tells herself.

Home is normal.

Home is hers.

And yet, as she drifts at last into uneasy sleep, it feels less like she has returned from somewhere, and more like she has brought something back with her.

The house moves at a slower rhythm during the holidays.

Mornings begin without bells or timetables. The light seeps gradually through gauzy curtains, pale and winter-thin, and Marla wakes before she needs to, because she has trained her body to expect structure and finds its absence faintly unsettling. She lies still for a while, listening to the low hum of the heating and the distant clatter of crockery from downstairs.

It should feel like freedom. Instead, it feels like being temporarily unassigned.

She dresses carefully anyway. Not uniform, but close enough: pressed trousers, a soft knit, hair brushed until it falls into obedient order. She doesn’t quite know who she is in joggers. That version of her exists only in theory.

Downstairs, her mother is already at the kitchen island, laptop open, glasses perched low on her nose. Even during the holidays, she works — emails, meetings, quiet competence conducted in hushed phone calls that never quite become audible enough to follow.

“You’re up early,” her mother says without looking up.

“I couldn’t sleep in.”

“You never could.”

There is no praise in the statement. Only mild, familiar observation. Marla pours herself tea and sits opposite, aware of the faint performance instinct rising again: back straight, ankles crossed, the careful way she lifts the cup.

Her mother glances up after a moment. “You don’t have to sit like that here, you know.”

Marla blinks. “Like what?”

“Like you’re waiting to be interviewed.”

The words land more precisely than any criticism at school ever has.

“I’m not,” Marla says lightly.

Her mother only hums, unconvinced, and returns to her emails.

***

On the second day of the holidays, her mother suggests they have lunch in the dining room “properly,” which is code for: no laptops, no phones, and conversation that sounds as if it has been rehearsed beforehand.

The table is laid with the good plates, though it is only the three of them. A jug of water with precisely sliced lemon. Cloth napkins folded into exact triangles. The room smells faintly of polish and lilies, the latter always replaced just before they begin to wilt.

“How is revision going?” her mother asks, once they are seated.

“Fine,” Marla says, because it is.

“You’re not overworking yourself?” her father adds.

“No.”

“You must pace yourself,” he continues gently. “Girls like you have a tendency to burn out before the real examinations even begin.”

Girls like you.

Marla smiles, small and polite. “I’m managing.”

They accept this. They always accept competence as a full answer. It is the one thing that requires no further probing.

Halfway through the meal, her mother says, with the same tone she might use to mention the weather, “Your brother rang yesterday.”

Marla’s fork pauses, very slightly.

“Oh,” she says. “That was nice.”

“Yes,” her mother replies. “He and Giuletta are looking at venues.”

“For the wedding?”

“Mm.”

Her father takes a sip of water. “They’re considering something small.”

Small is a word that, in this house, means expensive but discreet.

Marla nods. “That sounds like him.”

There is a brief silence after that, not uncomfortable exactly, but careful. No one asks if she will be invited to help, or be a bridesmaid. No one wonders aloud whether she has spoken to him recently. The subject closes as neatly as it opened.

They move on to school, to prefect elections, to the upcoming charity gala her mother is helping organise. Safe topics. Managed topics.

Marla finishes her lunch and folds her napkin precisely, aligning the corners without thinking.

She cannot remember the last time her brother corrected her on something small — her grammar, her posture, the way she held her pen — the way he used to when she was younger. She used to resent it. Now she suspects she misses it.

***

Her aunt Lillian arrives unannounced that evening, which in practice means she has texted ten minutes beforehand and expects the house to rearrange itself accordingly.

“My darling girl,” she says, kissing both of Marla’s cheeks in quick succession. “You look exhausted. Good. It means you’re working hard.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Marla says.

Her presence alters the rhythm of the house immediately. Voices grow a little louder, conversation a little less cautious. She perches on the arm of the sofa rather than sitting properly, shoes still on, as if she has never entirely accepted that rooms are meant to be preserved rather than used.

“So,” she says, fixing Marla with that precise, assessing gaze, “tell me what is actually happening at this school of yours. Not the brochure. The drama. The intrigue.”

Marla hesitates. At school, she knows exactly what to say. Which details to include, which to omit, how to phrase things so they sound impressive but not boastful, challenging but not dramatic. Here, under her aunt’s scrutiny, those rehearsed lines feel suddenly thin.

“It’s… demanding,” she says carefully.

Her aunt’s mouth quirks. “Demanding how?”

“Academically. Socially. There’s a lot of expectation.”

“From whom?”

Marla considers. Teachers. Peers. The institution itself, heavy and ancient and quietly insistent. But none of those feel like the real answer.

“From everyone,” she says finally.

Her aunt studies her for a moment longer than is comfortable. “And from yourself, I imagine, most of all.”

Marla does not respond.

Her mother, from across the room, intervenes lightly. “She thrives under pressure.”

“Of course she does,” her aunt replies. “That’s the danger.”

The word hangs there, unexpected.

Marla laughs, too quickly. “I’m not in any danger.”

Her aunt’s eyes soften, but she does not retract the statement. “No,” she says. “Not yet.”

***

Later that night, Marla wanders into the hallway and pauses by the piano.

Her brother’s photograph sits exactly where it always has, frame polished, glass free of fingerprints. He looks younger in it than she feels now, though he must have been older than she is when it was taken.

She studies his expression. Open. Certain. As if the future had felt like something straightforward then, a series of sensible steps leading exactly where they were supposed to. She wonders when that certainty left him. Whether it happened all at once or gradually, in small compromises no one else noticed.

“Still up?” her father asks from the doorway.

She startles slightly. “Just getting some water.”

He nods, following her gaze to the photograph but not commenting on it. “You always admired him, you know.”

“I still do,” she says automatically.

Her father smiles faintly. “You’re different, though.”

“How?”

He considers this. “More… contained,” he says finally. “He was always trying to prove something. You already assume you must.”

The observation lands with surprising weight.

“I don’t assume that,” she says, a little too quickly.

He does not argue. “Get some rest,” he says instead. “You’ll have a busy term ahead.”

Busy. Productive. Successful. Words that sound like praise and obligation in equal measure.

When he leaves, Marla remains a moment longer, looking at Brian’s face once more.