"No thanks," Lucy had said.
That was all. It was the longest conversation they had ever had that wasn't about chores.
At a little after seven, Lucy went to the mudroom.
She had left the coat on the back of the kitchen stool all afternoon. Now she had it over her arm. She meant to take it upstairs with her, to her room, where she had been sleeping with it on the foot of her bed since January. She did not think she could leave it on the hook anymore. Not after today. Not where anybody could just reach out and take it.
But when she came around the corner, Paige was standing in the mudroom.
She was standing in front of the coat rack in her striped shirt and her socks, with her arms wrapped around herself, and her hair had come out of the claw clip and was hanging loose around her face. Her eyes were swollen almost shut. She was holding the envelope Grandma Irene had left, the one with the green handwriting on the front. Lucy didn't know how she had gotten it. Maybe Dana had given it to her. Maybe she had just come down and found it there on the bench. It hadn't been opened. Paige was just holding it, the way you hold something that might be hot.
She looked up when Lucy came in. Lucy stopped.
For a moment neither of them said anything. Outside the glass-paned door, the snow had finally slowed. The streetlight at the end of the driveway had come on, and the flakes drifting through its cone of light looked lazy, almost weightless, as if they had nowhere particular to be.
Paige looked at the coat over Lucy's arm.
"Can I," she said, and stopped. Her voice was hoarse. She tried again. "Can I just—not wear it. I don't want to wear it. I just want to—"
She didn't finish. She held out her hands.
Lucy looked at her for a long moment. At her sister's face, which she had been looking at across the dinner table for eleven months, and which she suddenly saw, for the first time, in the streetlight coming through the glass. The long neck. The way her chin came up even when she was trying not to cry. The gray-green eyes, swollen and red-rimmed. Lake water in October.
Lucy had always thought Paige looked like Dana. She had never once thought to check.
She held out the coat.
Paige took it in both hands. She didn't put it on. She held it the way Lucy had held it in the kitchen that afternoon, against her chest, her face turned a little toward the collar, and Lucy watched her breathe in, once, and hold it, and let it out. Lucy knew what she was smelling. Lavender soap. Car heater. Something underneath with no name.