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 train smells faintly of rain and crisps. Julian stands the entire way home because he gave his seat to a woman with two toddlers and a pram she can’t quite fold properly. He doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t need to. Aria sits cross-legged opposite him on their suitcases, reading the same paragraph of her book three times and not absorbing any of it. The train jolts, and her braids clatter, bright pink beads shining under the fluorescent lighting.

“You’re staring,” she says eventually, without looking up.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

He isn’t staring at her. He’s staring at the reflection in the window. Two navy blazers. Two crests stitched in gold thread. The school looks expensive even in reverse.

He wonders what they look like to everyone else on the carriage.

Successful.

Out of place.

Both.

***

Their house is a semi-detached on a quiet road that tries to look more suburban than it is. The front garden has a stubborn patch of grass that never quite recovers from winter. The recycling bins are visible from the pavement. The windows could use repainting.

The house smells faintly of antiseptic and star anise. Julian notices it the moment he pushes the door open, though he pretends not to. The hallway is narrower than he remembers, or maybe he’s just grown again since October. His suitcase bumps against the skirting board, leaving a faint grey scuff his mum will probably apologise for later even though it isn’t her fault.

“Hello?” he calls, already quieter than he means to be.

“There they are,” his dad says, stepping out of the living room, too brightly. “Look at you.”

He hugs Aria first, then Julian, and Julian can feel the way his father holds him half a second longer than usual — checking weight, checking solidity, as if he’s assessing structural integrity.

“Where’s Mum?” Aria asks immediately.

“Upstairs. She’s resting.”

Julian’s jaw tightens just slightly.

Resting means chemo week.

A tree stands in the corner, slightly lopsided, decorated with the same ornaments they’ve had since Julian was seven — paper angels, a clay star Aria made in Year Two, a glass bauble that survived being dropped once and never quite regained its symmetry. There is tinsel, but not too much. There are presents under the tree, but fewer than last year. Julian notices these things automatically.

He does not comment.

“You’ve both grown,” his dad says, as though that is news. “The school feeding you properly?”

“They try,” Julian says.

Aria rolls her eyes. "It's passable," she says, "but I need something with spice."

Their dad smiles wryly. "I've made jerk chicken."

Julian hears Aria squeal and the hug that succeeds it, but he's already halfway up the stairs.

Upstairs, their mother is propped up in bed, wrapped in a cardigan that used to belong to Julian, drinking from a mug balanced on a coaster that says WORLD’S BEST MUM in slightly peeling gold letters. Her hair is shorter than when they left in September. Not gone. Just thinner. Carefully styled so it looks intentional. Aria pushes past him before he can take off his coat, dropping her rucksack in the middle of the hall with the same careless thud she’s always been allowed at home and never at school.

She smiles when she sees them — wide and determined.

“There are my scholars.”

Aria launches herself at the bed before Julian can stop her. Their mother laughs, then winces, then laughs again to cover it.

Julian stays standing for a second too long.

He hates that his first thought is inventory:
Skin tone.
Dark circles.
Breathing.

“You look taller,” she says to him.

“You say that every time.”

“Well, stop growing then.”

He smiles, because she wants him to.

He sits on the edge of the bed and takes her hand carefully, like it might bruise. It doesn’t.

“I told everyone at the hospital you’re Head Boy next year,” she says.

“You did not.”

“I did. They were very impressed.”

“You can’t just lie to strangers.”

“It’s not a lie,” she says calmly. “It’s true."

Julian hangs back for half a second, then steps forward and kisses her on the cheek. Her skin is cooler than it used to be.

“You’re home early,” she says.

“Train was on time for once,” he replies.

“That’s a Christmas miracle.”

He smiles because that’s the expected thing to do. The house looks mostly the same: same slightly sagging bookshelves, same rug that’s a bit too small for the room, same framed photos of school plays and swimming certificates and Aria with missing front teeth grinning into the sun. The difference is in the small rearrangements. The armchair closer to the window. The side table with a neat row of pill bottles, labels turned away as if modest.

“You’ve decorated,” Aria says.

“Bit at a time,” their mum replies. “Your uncle came round last week and bullied me into putting it up.”

Julian can picture that perfectly. Uncle Jack bustling about, opening boxes, insisting it would feel more festive. Their mum laughing, letting herself be persuaded.

“Where’s Dad?” he asks.

“Kitchen,” Aria says. “He's going to get you to try a gingerbread. Don't do it."

That is also perfectly predictable.

Julian heads through, unbuttoning his coat as he goes. The kitchen is warmer, cluttered in the comfortable way that school kitchens never are: toast crumbs on the counter, a tea towel draped over the oven handle, post fanned out beside the fruit bowl. His dad is standing at the kettle, staring at it as if waiting will make it boil faster.

“You made it,” he says, turning.

“Hi.”

They do the awkward half-hug men do when they’re not sure what version of affection is appropriate anymore.

“How was term?”

“Fine,” Julian says automatically.

“Busy?”

“Yeah.”

His dad nods like this confirms something important. “Good. Busy’s good.”

Julian leans against the counter. “How’s Mum today?”

There’s a small pause. Not long. Just long enough to register.

“Good day,” his dad says finally. “Tired, but good.”

Julian nods. That’s the language they use now. Good day. Bad day. Manageable. Bit rough. Words that circle the thing without naming it directly.

He pours three mugs of tea and carries them through carefully, as if spilling would somehow be catastrophic.

Aria is cross-legged on the floor, showing their mum something on her phone. “And then she just looked at me like I’d personally ruined her life. It wasn’t even that bad, it was just a joke.”

“I’m sure it was very funny,” their mum says diplomatically.

“It was,” Aria insists, then glances up at Julian. “He’d have laughed.”

Julian raises his mug in agreement. “I would have.”

He sits on the armchair, the one that used to be his mum’s but is now positioned slightly to the side, angled so she doesn’t have to twist to look at them. He notices things like that now. Small logistical kindnesses.

“So,” their mum says, settling back. “Year Twelve and Year Eight. That sounds very grand when I say it out loud.”

“It doesn’t feel grand,” Aria says. “It feels like homework.”

“You always liked homework,” Julian points out.

“I liked finishing homework,” she corrects.

Their mum smiles at that, but Julian sees the way her eyes linger on him for a moment longer than usual, searching his face the way she never quite did before this year. Checking, maybe, for stress or exhaustion or something else she doesn’t want to name.

“You’re eating enough?” she asks suddenly.

“Mum,” he says, half-laughing. “Yes.”

“You look thinner.”

“That’s just because the blazer makes everyone look like a Victorian schoolchild,” Aria says cheerfully. “It’s the cut.”

“Aria,” Julian mutters.

“What? It’s true.”

Their mum laughs, properly this time, and for a moment the room feels almost like it used to. Just them, teasing each other, Christmas lights blinking lazily in the corner.

Later, when Aria goes upstairs to dump her things and start complaining about how cold her room is, Julian stays behind to collect the mugs. He carries them into the kitchen, rinsing them one by one.

His dad joins him, leaning against the counter again.

“She was worried you might not want to come home this year,” he says quietly.

Julian turns. “Why wouldn’t I?”

His dad shrugs. “Sixth Form. Friends. Things going on. We didn’t want you to feel… obligated.”

The word lands awkwardly between them.

“I wanted to come home,” Julian says. And he means it. Even if home feels different now. Even if he spends half the time listening for sounds in the night he never used to notice.

His dad nods, relieved in a way he tries to hide. “Good.”

Upstairs, Julian’s room is exactly as he left it: posters slightly peeling at the corners, desk cluttered with revision notes and old pens that don’t work anymore, a stack of books he meant to read and never quite got round to. The bed is made too neatly, hospital-corner tight. His mum insisted on doing it herself.

His phone buzzes.

Aria:
Mum looks tired. Don’t say anything weird.

He types back:
I won’t.

Another message appears almost immediately.

Aria:
You already look like you’re about to say something weird.

He smiles despite himself.

Julian:
That’s just my face.

There’s a pause. Then:

Aria:
It’s good you’re here.

He stares at the words for a moment longer than necessary before locking his phone and setting it on the bedside table.

Downstairs, he hears his mum laugh again, softer this time, and the sound loosens something tight in his chest he hadn’t realised he’d been holding all term.

He lies back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling he used to count cracks in when he couldn’t sleep before exams. For the first time in weeks, he isn’t listening for the strange hum of chapel lights or the echo of footsteps in empty corridors. Just the ordinary sounds of home: the kettle refilling, Aria singing off-key next door, his parents talking in low voices they think he can’t hear.

It should feel uncomplicated.

It almost does.

He closes his eyes, telling himself that whatever is happening at school will stay there.

Downstairs, a floorboard creaks. A cupboard door shuts. Someone coughs.

Julian opens his eyes again and stares at the ceiling, listening, just to be sure everything is still where it should be.

Hannah wakes to incense. Not the real thing—just her Mum’s cinnamon candle she got for Christmas last year, still burning in its stubby glass jar—but it’s close enough.

She’s already banging pans in the kitchen. She can hear her slippers sticking to the lino with each step. The radiator’s on too high, heat clotted in the small room, and her tights cling when Hannah peels them up her legs, running a brush half-heartedly through her hair. It smells like stale coconut oil that she didn’t quite wash out all the way. Her mirror spits back a tired face: eyeliner smudged, a faint bruise blooming where she walked into the door at the St Anne’s Sixth Form open day. She rubs at it, half-proud, remembering that junior prefect leaning against the altar, her wry smile when Hannah cracked a joke no one else dared laugh at.

Downstairs, the house smells of fried onions and cumin from the pot her grandmother started too early.

“Come on, beta,” her father calls, the crispness of his shirt already undercut by the faint smell of cigarette smoke from the front door. He is always half one thing and half another — half a believer, half not, half in the house and half out in the cold. Her mum presses a piece of dry toast into her hands. Hannah grabs her coat and squeezes her lips into something approximating obedience.

St Matthew’s is a squat red-brick church wedged between the halal butcher and Polish off-license. Hannah has always liked how ordinary it looks, as if holiness could live between cuts of meat and cheap cigarettes. Inside, the windows flare with blues and reds, and the organ thrums loud enough to shake her teeth.

“You’ve grown,” Liza Auntie says, like Hannah is still twelve. “Still so thin, though.”

Hannah smiles because it’s easier, and because she’s her godmother, and because she’ll feed her pakoras after Mass regardless.

Father Antony begins. Hannah slides in beside her parents, between Farah and Ahmed to stop them from fighting again, and Mum gives her skirt a little approving tug, straightening it as though God Himself is checking the hemline.

The readings come in Latin, then English and finally Urdu. A girl a couple years older than Hannah stands at the lectern, her dupatta pinned with a silver brooch, and reads the psalm with a voice steadier than Hannah’s has ever been. She wonders if she knows she’s beautiful.

Hannah mouths the words, not because she believes, but because the rhythm comforts her. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. She glances at her Mum’s bowed head, Dad’s steady jaw, and she feels like an impostor— an actor in a borrowed costume. Then she sees the twins snickering into their hymn books, and she feels normal again. She is still fifteen. She’s allowed to be a bored kid at Mass for a little while longer.

Communion comes, and Hannah kneels in the quiet shuffle forward. The Host disappears on her tongue, chalky and holy and false. She thinks of how much she wanted to stay in the St Anne’s English classroom forever, with that prefect girl, with the soft hair and the green eyes, before she led her out to the chapel—and how it might feel exactly like this: dissolving, dissolving, until there’s nothing left of her except a strange sweetness no one wants to admit is there.

When the peace comes, Hannah shakes her father’s hand, then her mother’s, then the woman in front who smells of rosewater. She doesn’t know what to do with the way her chest aches when she presses her palm a second longer than needed, the way it makes her skin itch and burn at once. She shifts in her seat, half afraid her mother can smell that thought on her.

After Mass, the hall is chaos: Styrofoam cups, trays of samosas and homemade biscuits competing for space on the fold-out tables.

Hannah sticks near the corner, watching her Dad get cornered into an argument about Pakistan’s batting order.

“Hannah.” It’s Raftaar Uncle again, his eyes milky but still sharp. “Your mother tells me you visited a new Sixth Form.”

“Yeah. St Anne’s. It’s in Sussex.”

He smiles. “Sussex?”

“I’d be boarding.”

“I’m sure your mother won’t be happy about that.”

Hannah nods and laughs, pretending to not hear what he meant.

Your mother needs you.

She looks at them as Raftaar Uncle shuffles away. The twins have already charmed extra biscuits out of Liza Auntie, who scolds them while pressing more into their hands. Mum is already praising someone’s samosas, trading half written recipes that neatly avoid revealing family secrets.

Hannah sips her too-hot chai and thinks about the sky at St Anne’s, about the way the stone seemed to hum under her boots. She thinks about the prefect girl’s eyes, too intent, too knowing. She tells herself not to, and then she does anyway.

Mum appears at her side, squeezing Hannah’s shoulder. “You’ll do well there,” she says. “It’s a good place.”

Hannah only smiles and nods and says, “Yes, Mum,” because she knows her Mum needs her to.

And because she doesn’t know how to explain that sometimes the voices that call you the loudest aren’t God’s at all.

The drive home is quieter.

The kitchen fills with steam: lamb curry, roast potatoes, gulab jamun sweating syrup in a silver dish, ice-cream left to defrost on the side.

Her father asks about St. Anne’s again. “Are you sure? It’s far. Can’t wait to get away from us?” He laughs; her aunt clucks about tuition fees.

Her mother, tight with pride, says, “They liked her very much. She’ll be a prefect one day. She’s perfectly ready.”

Hannah stares at her plate. Yesterday she had stood in the foyer and ran numbers in her head - there was a group of Tamil boys, a girl who might’ve been mixed, a teacher called Mrs Gill who was just Scottish with a Sikh husband. Today she is picking cardamom pods out of her food and nodding along in Urdu while her nani tells her she must work hard, that she is blessed to have opportunities she never dreamed of in Lahore.

But in the quiet between voices, Hannah hears it: the echo of bells, the hum in the stones. She swallows and looks at her mother, who is laughing at a joke about Brexit while her cousins argue over football scores. Farah and Ahmed ask about pudding again, with their plates practically full. Laughter and noise roll over her like weather.

When the plates are cleared and the tea is poured, Hannah excuses herself, claiming homework. She goes upstairs, shuts her door, and pulls the curtains tight. She lies on her bed staring at the ceiling, thinking of St. Anne’s. She closes her eyes. The voices do not stop.

The chapel’s pew had felt like a wound - and she fit inside it perfectly.