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Lily and the boy did not return at lunchtime. Evelyn made herself a salad but did not feel hungry in the slightest and left the leaves untouched in the bottom of the bowl.

She took herself off to the burn to consider what should be done. About the boy, about Lily. There was the bag she’d found, too. She’d hidden it under the workbench in the long wooden box they used for the croquet mallets. She could not bring herself to open it. She’d had enough revelations for the day, and who was to say the bag’s contents wouldn’t be as unsettling, or as poisonous, as the inside of the house.

The burn was her mother’s favorite place in the garden, and a good spot for thinking. Evelyn had never been sure why it was called that. Her father’s word for it. The way he said the word gave it two complete syllables. The stream emptied from the lake, black and silken in the shade of the trees, and ran over rocks and roots all the way to the wall, where it disappeared under a small arch into the beyond. Sometimes it dried up, only to return with one of the obliterating downpours that visited them very occasionally. The water in the lake rose and fell but never disappeared. Their mother had said it was fed by a spring, and if the spring survived, then it must have been raining somewhere. Some other lush and verdant place that Evelyn preferred not to think about.

She sat on the bank among the flowers. Campion, brunnera, buttercups, wild garlic. The grass was cool under her palms and her thighs. She saw wagtails and thrushes dipping in the stream, a storm of gnats boiling in a shaft of sunlight. There was a knotted rope swing hanging over one of the pools, from before.

Evelyn closed her eyes and breathed in the sweet-savory smell of the garlic and heard wild laughter. She thought it was the sound of Lily on the swing, and the memory came to her with more force than any before it. It seemed to replace every other thought and sensation with an intensity like the smell of her father’s tobacco.

She should never have looked in the sunroom. It had made a breach not just in the sanctity of the house but also in herself, and now everything she wished to forget would come in a torrent and she would have nothing with which to shore up her being. She made fists of the garlic leaves on either side of her.

She heard Lily’s laugh again, and it was joined by another and the rustle of leaves. She opened her eyes and looked downstream and saw her sister and the boy tramping toward her. The boy held their wood axe over one shoulder and was helping Lily through the undergrowth. There was a slight smile on his lips. The expression made him look different, older.

A smile, after everything he had done!

They saw her and stopped laughing, and Evelyn felt a cold flush at the base of her skull.

“Would you believe it,” said Lily. “She’s actually having a rest for once.”

“I think I’ve earned it,” Evelyn said flatly.

Evelyn looked at the boy, and the boy stopped smiling and looked at his feet again.

“You won’t believe this,” said Lily, and ruffled his hair. “Those poplars that have been lying there for years? Sawed and split, the lot of them! You can’t stop him when his blood’s up.”

Evelyn watched them. Thick as thieves. She doubted Lily would even care if she told her what she knew about the boy’s activities.

“What were you laughing about?” Evelyn asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just a silly joke.”

Evelyn found their faces closed and uncommunicative. The boy leaned into Lily and raised a hand to her ear in a whisper. Lily nodded and smiled.

“Go on, then,” she said.

The boy glanced at Evelyn and then went off on his own, up the burn, back to the house.

“What was all that about?” said Evelyn.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Lily.”

“He’s going to give you a surprise.”

“He’s already given me one surprise this morning.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Evelyn watched the boy’s willowy silhouette loping along the path. A purpose all his own. She was struck suddenly by how little she actually knew about him. Not his name, nor his age. She couldn’t even guess it, when years meant nothing to her anymore. Ten years old? Twenty? If she had to answer, she would have said he was somewhere between the two. She wondered if that meant he was actually closer to being a man than she’d first suspected. Hadn’t Lily said so under the covers? Why had she not found that more alarming at the time?

Evelyn waited until he was out of sight and then took her sister’s hand.

“He’s been going in the house,” she said.

Lily blinked a couple of times. “Has he?”

“Yes. I’m sure of it. He’s been going through the sunroom. Where I was looking this morning.”

“How are you so sure?”

Evelyn paused. “I just am,” she said.

Lily smiled.

“What?” said Evelyn. “This is not funny, Lily!”

“You had a peek, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“You did! You disobeyed Mama. Well, hurrah for that! A teenage rebellion at the ripe old age of…whatever you are.”

Evelyn gripped her sister’s wrist more tightly and Lily grimaced.

“Ouch! Go easy!”

“What do we do? We can’t just have him going in and out of the house as he pleases!”

“Can’t we?”

“Excuse me?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? He can do what he wants. If he wants to risk life and limb, that’s up to him.”

“It’s not just that it’s dangerous. There are other things in there.”

“Like what?”

“You know what I mean!”

“I don’t, actually. Unless you mean monsters, but I think I’m a little old to be falling for that again.”

“I’m talking about the things from before. All of those things that Mama kept us safe from. Men’s things.”

“As far as I remember, she never actually said what those things were,” Lily said.

“Yes, and thank God she didn’t! I don’t want to know anything about them.”

“You don’t have to. You’re not the one going into the house, are you?” Lily shrugged. “Doesn’t make any difference if he goes wandering round up there. Means nothing to him. They’re Mama’s rules, not his.”

Evelyn let go of her sister’s arm and stared at her in disbelief. “Why are you being like this?”

“What am I being like?”

“Bloody-minded.”

“I’m being the opposite of bloody-minded. You’re the one who’s incapable of thinking about things differently.”

Evelyn was lost for words. The nonchalance in the way Lily spoke. She wondered if her sister was still slightly drunk from the night before. Or perhaps she had always felt this way? The vagueness of their mother’s threats had made a blank space of the inside of the house, and only now was Evelyn realizing that she and her sister saw that blankness quite differently. It excited Lily. It terrified Evelyn.

“You knew he’d been in the house, anyway,” Lily went on. “Didn’t you see him up there in the window days ago? When we were playing the game?”

“Yes, exactly!”

“Then why are you flying off the handle now?”

Evelyn took several breaths to steady herself. She thought to tell her sister about the bag, too, but Lily began picking her way through the garlic and the nettles back toward the path.

“Don’t just walk away from me, Lily.”

Lily shook her head but kept on walking.

“Honestly, Evie,” she said, “sometimes you sound so much like her, it’s frightening.”