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Lily returned in the evening wearing oven gloves and a bandanna and smelling of woodsmoke. The boy came back a little later holding his old boots. He put them in a neat pair by the kitchen door. Evelyn frowned when she saw them.

“You’re keeping them?” she said.

“I thought it was a shame to get rid of them,” said Lily.

“Why?”

Lily shrugged. “I don’t know. I just liked them.”

She came in and took off her gloves and mask and started heating a pan of soup.

They played their card game after their supper. There were twenty-five cards in their mother’s deck, soft and grubby and thumbed to disintegration. The set had three angular, sad-looking queens and one king whose mustache matched the contours of a supercilious smile. Lily called them the family cards. The queens were the sisters and their mother, and she said the king looked like their father. “Who’s got Papa?” she used to wonder out loud once the cards had been dealt, and their mother would get angry and the game would be over.

The boy had played cards before but did not know any of the games that Evelyn and Lily knew. They’d had to invent their own to suit their butchered deck. Evelyn sat with her cup of cloudy potato wine, drank it down to its sweet floury dregs, and watched as Lily impatiently tried to explain the rules to the boy. Evelyn found it very funny. The wine warmed and loosened her, and soon she was laughing aloud, all of her light and drunk and billowing like a sheet on a line. She helped herself to another cup.

Lily and the boy kept drinking, too. He winced and spluttered at every mouthful but always went back for more. While they were still arranging their hands, Evelyn saw Lily show the boy her cards and give an almost imperceptible wink. The boy very nearly smiled.

“What are you doing?” said Evelyn.

“Nothing,” said Lily.

Evelyn frowned and put down her first card.

She was the best player among them and she won the first two hands. Then followed a run of bad luck and she lost the third and the fourth, and continued losing, until it became clear that the other two had formed some unspoken alliance that perhaps even they weren’t aware of. In the final round the boy produced “Papa” from his sheaf of cards and slapped it on the tabletop, leaving Evelyn with nothing. Lily clapped in triumph, though the victory wasn’t hers.

“He got you, Evie!” she crowed. “Not as stupid as he looks, is he?”

The boy scooped all of Evelyn’s cards from the middle of the table and added them to his own. Evelyn shook her head.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “You can’t team up.”

“Says who?” said Lily.

“We’ve never played it like that.”

Lily laughed. “Are you joking?” she said. “You used to do it with Mama all the time!”

“Do what?”

“Gang up on me.”

“No we didn’t!”

“You have a very selective memory sometimes, Evie,” Lily said, and laughed shortly, but Evelyn couldn’t work out how serious the remark was meant to be.

Lily drained her glass and dealt the cards again. As soon as she had finished, Evelyn leaned over and peered at the boy’s cards and started helping him to arrange his next hand.

“Don’t!” cried Lily. “She’s trying to trick you!”

“I would never do such a thing,” said Evelyn.

She took her chair round to their side of the table and started swapping cards in and out, laughing at her own brazenness. Lily started laughing, too, screeching in delight and disbelief. The boy sat between them, unsure if he was the butt of the joke or not. Lily bent a card between thumb and forefinger and fired it in front of his nose at Evelyn. Evelyn caught it and threw it back. Lily slipped a thin arm between the boy and the back of his chair and poked Evelyn in the ribs. Evelyn started to squirm.

“Stop! Don’t!” Her eyes were watering. “My back!”

“Should have thought of that before you started cheating.”

“Ouch! I mean it!”

The boy slipped out from between them. They fought for another few minutes, jabbing and scratching with a kind of fearful hilarity, the scrap forever threatening to turn into something more violent than good fun. Eventually Evelyn grasped her sister’s wrists and held them firm and there was a pause in hostilities. Her back throbbed dully beneath the wine, but there was a kind of pleasure in each spasm. Evelyn kept a hold of Lily’s thin arms and looked around. The boy wasn’t at the table.

“Oh. Where’s he gone?”

Evelyn got up, staggered, slumped back into the chair. She squinted against the brightness of the lamp and saw that the boy was at the far end of the kitchen, where the other door had once been.

“What are you doing all the way over there?” she said. She heard the slur in her words and felt faintly embarrassed.

“Do you think we frightened him?” said Lily.

“Silly thing,” said Evelyn. “We’re not really fighting.”

“Aren’t we?” said Lily. “I was.” She gave another grin that Evelyn could not read.

“Come back here,” she called to the boy. He was looking at the wardrobe that covered the doorway to the rest of the house. Evelyn felt very sober very quickly. “Come on, we were only playing. Nothing for you to see there. Quickly now, back you come.”

The air in the kitchen seemed suddenly thick with their breath. A winey miasma between them and the boy. When he turned around, there was a faint scowl on his face. He came back to the table and filled their glasses with wine again.

“That’s enough for me,” said Evelyn.

“Boo!” said Lily. “Fill me up. Yes, please, right to the top. Thank you very much.” She drank it down in one go. “Pour yourself one while you’re at it.” He did.

Evelyn said, “It’s bedtime, both of you,” but neither seemed to hear her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Lily said to the boy. She pointed a finger at him and then leaned over the table and prodded the boy’s nose.

“Lily, leave him.”

“You’re thinking about what’s behind that door, aren’t you? Nosy little thing! Well, we’ve got questions, too, you know. So how about a deal.” She gave a slow, drunken wink. “We’ll tell you what’s inside the house if you’ll tell us what’s outside the wall.”

“That’s enough, Lily!”

Both the boy and Lily jumped.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Evelyn. She looked at the boy. “Neither does he.”

“Ah, he doesn’t mind. Do you? What’s in that big old head of yours?”

She rapped on his skull with one swollen knuckle, but the boy just closed his eyes and shook his head.

“You see? He doesn’t want to talk,” said Evelyn. “Now. Bedtime. What would Mama say if she knew we were up so late?”

She went and settled into their nest, but her sister continued watching the boy with a new intensity. Over the course of many days, suspicion had turned to fascination, without Evelyn realizing it. And was there a closeness, too? It had seemed so from the way they’d played cards. Evelyn felt something cold in her belly that she dared not call jealousy.

The boy looked into his lap and examined his fingers as if he didn’t recognize them. Lily sniffed and poured them both another cup of potato wine, but he didn’t drink his.

“Well, this is dull,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

Evelyn rolled over in her blankets. She no longer billowed. She was on the other side of drunkenness now, damp and cold and sluggish and dizzy. Her sister sat and hummed to herself, sometimes posing questions to the boy, to Evelyn, to the darkness. She never got a reply, but there was time. Evelyn closed her eyes and forced herself to sleep, knowing that her sister was strong, and that the boy was weak, and her questions would find answers soon enough.