“It felt… strange…,” Liz says, slowly. The firelight is reflecting off her glasses, making her expression even harder to read than usual, but I can see her forehead crinkle as she frowns.

“Did you resent Topher?” I ask. “For quashing the sale? I think I would have.”

But Liz is shaking her head.

“I never really wanted the money, to be honest. It never felt like mine. It was such a stupid sum, and for what?”

“Being in the right place at the right time, I guess?” I say with a laugh, but Liz doesn’t smile back. She shakes her head again, although I’m not sure what she’s denying. I can’t blame her though. Whatever place we have ended up in, all of us, it’s definitely not the right one.

Silence falls again. I look at my watch. Ten minutes to four. God, could this day pass any slower? Suddenly I can’t sit any longer, and I stand, putting my weight carefully on my swollen ankle, and make my way over to the long window overlooking the valley.

It is almost completely dark outside now, but the chalet is dark too, and so I don’t need to cup my hands to my eyes as I look out across the snow, wondering where Danny and the others are. Have they made it to Haut Montagne yet? And what about Topher and his party? I wish, harder than I’ve ever wished for anything before, that I had a phone with just a single bar of reception. Or a two-way radio. Or anything—some way of communicating with the outside world.

“Four aces,” says Liz, over my shoulder, and I sigh, and turn back to the darkening room.

LIZ

Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

It is 3:58. We are on our—I don’t know. Twentieth game of rummy, perhaps. I have not been counting. Thoughts are chasing around my brain like rats. Questions like: What is going to happen? When will they come? What will happen when the police get here?

Erin glances up at the clock on the mantelpiece above the stove. I can tell that she is feeling the same way I am.

“One more round,” she says, “and then I’ll figure out something for supper. They should be there by now.”

If they made it.

The words hang, unspoken, in the air, as Erin begins to deal.

It is more to drive the unsaid doubts away than because I really want to know that I say it.

“Topher said you were in an avalanche. What was it like?”

Erin looks up. I have caught her by surprise, and for a second her face is unguarded, horribly vulnerable. She looks like I have punched her. For a moment, I regret asking her. Then she composes herself. She deals out the last few cards before she speaks.

“I was. Three years ago. It was—” She stops, looks down at the remainder of the deck in her hand. “It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. Then something occurs to me. “Even counting this weekend?”

She gives a laugh at that, a shaky mirthless one, and nods.

“Yes, unbelievably. Even counting this weekend. I can’t explain how awful it was. The noise, the shock, the sense of powerlessness—” She falters, as if she is struggling to find the words. “I thought… I thought that it would have made it worse, you know? Being caught up in the same horror all over again. But in a strange way I… I think I’ve been expecting it to happen. Like I escaped the mountain once, so it would come back for me.”

She stares into the darkness. She is facing me, so it should feel like she is staring at me, but I have the odd feeling that she is not, that she is looking through me, as if I am not there. It gives me a strange sensation. As if I am already gone.

“Is that when you—when you got your—” I can’t say it. I just touch my face with my fingers, and she nods.

“Yes. I cut my face on something in the fall, probably my own ski.”

“And is that why you left uni?” I ask, and she nods, very slowly.

“Yes. I can’t really explain why, even now. I just—I felt like I’d become a different person, do you know what I mean?”

I nod too. I know exactly what she means. I have the impression that she is talking about this perhaps for the very first time.

“I had to dig him out.”

Her voice is barely above a whisper. I have to strain to hear it.

“I wasn’t carrying a GPS locator. I had to dig out my boyfriend to activate his beacon, knowing he was already dead.”

She looks down, cuts the pack, deals the first card into the pickup pile, moving mechanically all the while.

Suddenly I do not want to talk about this anymore. I wish I had never asked the question. After all, I have my own secrets, my own subjects I do not want to discuss. What if Erin asks me about my past in return? What if she brings up Snoop again? About why I left? What if she asks about the friends I don’t have, the schoolmates who bullied me for fourteen years, about the family I have cut myself off from?

I hear again my father’s slurring voice, my mother’s sobs… I taste blood. I am chewing my cuticles again. I stick my hands in the pockets of my jumpsuit.

But Erin does not ask about any of these things. She seems to be somewhere else completely, somewhere very far away. When she speaks, her voice has a strange quality to it. It is like a confession.

“It was my fault, you see,” she says. She picks up her cards. Her hands are trembling a little. “I suggested we go. Off-piste skiing. I was the one who wanted to do it. I killed them.” She swallows. “That changes a person.”

She looks up at me, as if expecting me to understand. I have the most peculiar urge to take her hand and tell her that I know how she feels.

But that would be crazy. So I don’t. Instead, I look down at my own cards. I pick up a three of hearts and discard a jack.

“Your move,” I say.

ERIN

Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 10

I don’t know what made me spill my past to Liz like that. It was the strangest thing. I’ve never talked to anyone about that time—not my parents, not Will’s parents; even the coroner and the search and rescue team only wanted the bare facts, not to hear about my bewilderment and grief.

It’s not that I didn’t have the chance—my mother urged me to see a therapist, and I lost count of the number of friends who called me up, saying, If you need to talk, I’m only a phone call away. But I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to be that person. An object of pity. A victim.

Because I know how Topher and the others must feel, in a way. For I felt it too. And that’s the thing I have never told anyone—that in the minutes and hours I spent searching for Will and Alex after the avalanche, it wasn’t terror or fear that was uppermost in my mind but a kind of shocked disbelief, that this had happened to me, to us. I was not this person. I was not the person terrible things happened to. That was other people, other families. I was golden, slipping through life on a charm, insulated by the security of my family, my own good looks, and the luck of having found Will’s love.

Because yes, that was luck. All of it. And I knew it. But it was also how it was supposed to be, because I was supposed to be lucky.