She put her hands up to her face, and now finally she was behaving properly. Both her sisters sprang to her side.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Lyn, smoothing a lock of Gemma’s hair behind her ear, like she was a little child. “And bun? More bun?”

“No, thank you.”

Cat patted her arm nervously. “Would you like to get drunk?”

“Yes please. Or no. I know. High.”

“Sorry?”

“Marcus has got some dope. It’s in the cupboard above the stove.”

So that’s how they spent the night before Marcus’s funeral.

Lyn rolled a beautiful neat joint and they sat cross-legged on his clean creamy carpet and passed it around, without saying a word. Gemma felt a satisfying rush of nothingness filling and expanding her brain.

“No wedding now,” she observed finally, as she passed the joint to Lyn.

Lyn narrowed her eyes as she inhaled and the tip of the joint burned brightly. “That’s right. No wedding.”

Gemma said, “You won’t get to wear your bridesmaid dresses.”

“No,” agreed Lyn, coughing a bit as she passed the joint to Cat.

“You hated your dresses, didn’t you?”

They sat with very upright backs and exchanged solemn looks.

“Yes, we did hate them,” Cat said slowly. “We really did.”

And that’s when they all started to giggle, wildly, rapturously, rocking back and forth with tears of hysteria running down their faces. Gemma watched Cat drop a piece of ash on Marcus’s pristine carpet and imagined his face twisting with rage. She got onto her hands and knees and still sobbing with laughter, she crawled over to the piece of ash and used the tip of her finger to rub it hard against the cream wool.

“You’re making it worse,” said Lyn.

“I know.” She rubbed her finger back and forth, harder and harder, smearing the black smudge across the carpet.

She never told anybody the thought that came into her head, the moment after Marcus collided with the concrete, while she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do, before she started running.

She didn’t think it so much, as hear it, with bell-like clarity, as if a sober person had walked into a drunken, noisy party, snapped off the music, and made an announcement in the sudden, stunned silence.

She recognized her own voice. Four clear, cool, precise words:

“I hope he’s dead.”

CHAPTER 13

Between the ages of two and three, the Kettle triplets began to babble to each other in their own secret, unintelligible dialect, switching effortlessly to English whenever they needed to communicate with a grown-up.

Years later, Maxine discovered this was a relatively common phenomenon among multiples, known as “twin talk” or more impressively—idioglossia. (At the time, all she really cared about was that they weren’t attempting to drown, suffocate, or bludgeon one another.)

Gradually, they talked less and less in their secret language and eventually it was erased from their memories, vanished like the lost language of an ancient tribe.

Psychic connections between twins and triplets are another well-documented and exciting phenomenon. In this area, however, the Kettle girls have always lagged. The idea, after all, is to feel your sibling’s pain, not laugh uproariously at it. Elvis, before he went onstage, was able to feel the presence of his dead twin brother, Jesse. Yet nine-year-old Gemma, immersed in her new Enid Blyton book, couldn’t even sense the stealthy presence of her very much alive sisters stealing a bag of mixed lollies from right next to her hand.

When they were eleven, Cat became obsessed with the idea of telepathic communication. Many hours were spent on complex experiments. Unfortunately, they all failed, due to the appalling incompetence of her sisters, who could neither send nor receive a coherent message.

No, the Kettle girls share no psychic connections. (A lot of the time they don’t even understand each other in ordinary verbal, sitting-across-the-table conversation.)

And so:

At nineteen, Lyn’s chin slams into her steering wheel in a car accident caused by a very drunk driver on the Spit Bridge. Gemma feels nothing, not the tiniest twinge, as she dances seductively in a dark, smoky club on Oxford Street, a frangipani in her ear, a cigarette between her fingers. And Cat doesn’t even pause for breath in screaming at her computer, which keeps crashing while she tries to finish an overdue uni assignment.

At twenty-two, Marcus whispers vicious threats into Gemma’s ear, and Cat senses nothing as she breathlessly wrestles with Dan while just outside the door his flat mate laughs heartily at Hey, Hey It’s Saturday. And Lyn is far away in another time zone and another season and doesn’t look up from suspiciously reading the label on a can of deodorant in a London chemist.

And at thirty-three, Cat rocks back and forth, back and forth, as her abdomen knots and locks and she silently screams, Stop it, stop it, stop it. Lyn feels nothing but pleasure as she watches Maddie’s awestruck face illuminated by the colors of fireworks thundering across the sky. And Gemma feels nothing but Charlie’s tongue and taste as she kisses him in the hallway of some friend of a friend’s New Year’s Eve party.

No, neither of them feels a thing until the first day of the New Year when Dan calls to say, “Cat’s lost the baby.”

CHAPTER 14

“Tell them I don’t want to see anybody,” Cat told Dan. Gemma, Lyn, and Maxine all agreed that was understandable and a good idea but obviously it didn’t apply to them, and so they all arrived separately within fifteen minutes, running up the flat stairs, striding inside, breathless and flushed. When they saw Cat, they stopped and crumpled as if they thought just by coming they could fix things and seeing her made them realize there was nothing to be done and nothing to be said.