Every December, the Hollis family put their tree in the front window so the whole street could see it.
It was Claire's mother's rule. Diane Hollis believed a house should look happy from the outside, and so the tree went up the Saturday after Thanksgiving, nine feet tall, trimmed in white lights and glass ornaments that nobody under the age of forty was allowed to touch. The wreath went on the door. The garland went on the banister. The four stockings went on the mantel in the order they had always gone: Greg, Diane, Madison, Claire.
Claire had noticed the order when she was eight. She had noticed, too, that her stocking hung on the hook that was a little loose, so that by Christmas Eve it always tipped toward the fireplace screen like it was trying to leave. She had never said anything about it. At seventeen, she still hadn't.
That was the thing about Claire. She noticed everything and said almost nothing, and the people around her had long ago mistaken the second part for not caring.
On the twenty-third of December she came home from her shift at Delaney's Bakery smelling of cinnamon and burnt sugar, her hands raw from the cold and the dish sink. The house was warm and loud. Her sister Madison was in the living room with two friends, filming something for her phone, music turned up high enough that the ornaments shivered on their branches.
"Claire! Move, you're in the shot," Madison said without looking up.
Claire stepped back into the hallway. Madison was fifteen and lovely in the effortless way that made adults stop and tell their mother so in grocery store lines. She had their father's dark curls and their mother's laugh, and she had been, since the day she was born, the center of every room she entered. Claire had been two years old when Madison arrived, too young to remember a time before her, and so she had grown up assuming that the sun was supposed to rise over somebody else.
In the kitchen, her mother was rolling out pie crust with the radio on. She didn't turn around.
"You're late," Diane said.
"Mrs. Delaney asked me to stay and do the trays for the Christmas Eve orders." Claire set her bag down. "She paid me extra."
"Well, good. You can put some of that toward your phone bill." Diane dusted flour from her hands. "Madison needs the living room tonight, so if you want to watch something, use the laptop in your room."
"I wasn't going to watch anything."
"Then it doesn't matter, does it?"
It didn't. It never did. Claire went upstairs to the small room at the end of the hall that had been a sewing room before it had been hers. Madison had the big bedroom with the bay window, because, as their mother had explained when Claire was eleven, Madison had more things and needed the space. That was true. Madison did have more things. Claire had a bed, a desk, a shelf of library books she renewed until the librarian joked that they ought to just let her keep them, and a corkboard with a single photograph pinned in the center.