She watches the crowd flock, like doves to birdseed, once the orange LED display changes. Her mouth presses against the coat. A new coat, with a fleece lining, one she actually likes. A carefully chosen Christmas present that she had to pretend to be surprised about, she didn't really mind.
"There we go. Hot chocolate." A paper cup with a plastic lid is set on the table. She glances at it, then turns back to the crowd. "Alright?" She nods, focuses on a toddler refusing to cooperate with his mother. "We'll go once they announce the platform. It'll be a while yet."
She turns and faces the woman opposite her. "Be nice to get home, won't it?"
"Mm." She sips through the tiny slot in the plastic lid. Warm and sweet and sickly. "Thanks." A nod of acknowledgement in return.
"Good seeing Phil, wasn't it?"
"Yeah."
"I think he's alright."
"Yeah, I think so." Another mouthful of hot chocolate to take the sour taste away.
"Have you decided about…" She shrugs. "He just wants to spend time with you, Lils." She shrugs again. "It's up to you."
"Auntie Rach?"
"Yes, darling."
"Do you think the crocuses will have hatched?"
"Hatched?" Her aunt gives a warm, despairing grin. "I don't know, lovely. We'll have to see."
She follows Lily onto the train, lugging the case up the steps.
"Sixty-four C and D." she murmurs beneath her breath. Her niece glares at her,
"I know." She decides that they are both too tired for her to discipline it - the waves of teenage anger that spring out of nowhere. Instead she blocks the aisle trying to fit the suitcase onto the luggage rack. Lily wanders down to the seats.
She follows after successfully slotting the bag above the others. A table, a man with a laptop and smart shoes who has taken up half of her niece's legroom.
"You alright sitting there?" she whispers. Lily nods, leans against her shoulder, rearranges her feet on the heating unit.
She is asleep by the time the train pushes gently out of the station and into the afternoon. The sky glows grey and tall, and the rain streams down the windows. The man shoots an annoyed glare at Rachel when Lily kicks him. Rachel buries her smile into her niece's hair.
She watches the terraced gardens pass by, and the glowing Christmas trees in pride of place, and the fairy lights strung up around curtain poles. She thinks that, secretly, deep down, she is quite glad that Lily found Melissa's attempts at seasonal domesticity so irritating. She had tried to give them space, in the two-bed flat, to spend time together, and talk, and hash things out the way a mother and daughter should.
Lily had done a lot of staring into her phone screen while her mother forced fun, loud and fast and competitive, because fun was all Melissa ever wanted. And of course, she knows why. She knows that her little sister's temptation for right now was borne out of an absence of anything else, but her niece…
Her niece has already spent too long making up for the mistakes of a seventeen-year-old with nowhere to go - she has learnt that much from the vague snippets Lily mumbles on long drives and countryside walks. She has learnt to listen for them and quietly understand.
She wakes with her niece's forehead pressed against her scarf, the blonde hair and the fleece-lined hood draped across her arm. The man has vanished along with his briefcase. She stretches her legs in front of her, revels in the space, then runs her fingers through Lily's hair.
"I love you." The quiet breaths still. "You know that don't you?" Her niece says nothing, tries harder to pretend to be asleep instead. She presses a kiss into the hair. "Because I do. I love you very much." Another kiss. "Nearly there now, darling."
She stacks the mug by the sink and wanders upstairs, across cold carpets and past the room with the dark pink duvet cover. Up and up to-
Her neatly made bed is already occupied, adolescent pyjamas sprawled over the covers. She tiptoes to the bathroom in silence, unpacks her toothbrush from the washbag.
It happens increasingly frequently, to the point that she has considered resurrecting the stairgate from the loft. The first time had sent her into a minor shock, she had gingerly lifted the covers and slid over the sheets. Now she nudges Lily back to her side of the bed, pulls the duvet over her and crawls in beside her, immediately accosted by tired arms and a small white rabbit.
She pulls the sheets closer around them, cradles his little girl to her chest. She prayed for this, for her, for a child with brown eyes and the same unblemished pragmatism as him.
"Are the crocuses…"
"No, not yet." She combs through the blonde, kisses the pale forehead. Her niece is still like this, quiet and insecure and furious, a curious amalgamation of her little sister and her best friend and someone she knew in a different life. A child attempting to house the world inside her skin. "I've got you, Lily-girl." she whispers. The rabbit is pushed further into her shoulder.
"Love you too." It is spoken quietly, muffled into her pyjama top. She thinks that children have no idea how young they are until it is too late.
"We'll go for a nice walk tomorrow, alright?" She watches the eyelids settle shut with a smile.
"Okay."
All of life is quietened, careful, predictable. They have a routine of compromise. They go for walks and visit garden centres and clean the mud off their shoes on the back doorstep. And then there is soup, and kettles boiling, and quick walks to the corner shop for bread. And all of it matters, every part of having a home is done on purpose. There is an unspoken agreement that they will never forfeit this, that they both understand what it is to be isolated.
"Oh." The front door opens before her fingertip has reached the doorbell.
"Sweetheart!" He grins down at her, clean-shaven, a new shirt, the pile of shoes tidied away. An entirely different father.
"Hello."
"Come on in, happy Christmas Eve." He stands aside. The house smells funny, like carpets and rattan baskets and pine. "Is Auntie Rach going to pick you up later?" She slips her shoes off and watches him push the door closed.
"No, she's…" Heels on the driveway. "She's just coming." The door swings open again, and her aunt stands gingerly on the doorstep, clutching two gift bags.
A tall, skinny boy emerges from the kitchen with a bag of crisps.
"Happy Christmas, Michael."
"Oh for christ's sake, mate, we're having dinner in a minute." Eddie sighs, running a weathered hand down his face. The boy brushes his fingers against his jeans.
"Hey, Lily." He murmurs, embracing her in an awkward hug. His little sister doesn't mind. She hugs him back, squeezes her eyes shut and feels the crisp packet crinkle against her arm.
"Hey." She has started to tell people she has a brother. She boasts about the films he gets her discounted tickets to see at the cinema, the conversations they have in the McDonalds car park. She tells them he is clever, and funny, and good at video games.
For a moment she thinks about sitting up and moving away. Her dad smells the same way he did when she was younger, like the yellowing pages of old books, mulled wine, men's deodorant, wooden rulers from the back of the stationery drawer, like safety. He breathes slowly, deeply, warm shirt sleeve pushing against her face. Then he moves, an arm around her shoulders, her forehead against his chest. She can't remember the last time one of her parents held her like this.
"Asleep?" Rachel whispers.
"Yeah." he whispers back. Lily keeps her eyes closed, lets her breath warm her hands.
"All tired out."
"Yeah, must be." She likes this. It is like being small all over again. A love without expectations. "Thirteen."
"I know." Rachel smiles at him. "Doesn't feel like it." She brushes a strand of blonde over her niece's shoulder.
"No?"
"No. Feels like yesterday."
"It felt odd going back, they've still got the same chairs in the staffroom." he murmurs. She giggles quietly.
"Is your classroom the same?"
"It's a different one, but the desks haven't changed, they've still got the graffiti from when we were there."
"What does it say?"
"Oh, nothing very positive about maths." She grins at him,
"I am glad you've gone back into teaching."
"Yeah, feels right."
"I'm proud of you, you know."
"Thanks." he chuckles, as though he is too old to receive praise seriously. And she knows that, had his daughter not been curled up between them, she would have let her gaze drop to his lips and leaned closer, just enough to plant the idea in his mind. Instead she nods and looks at the hands curled over themselves.
"Time to take her home, I think."
She is glad when they don't. When they sit and talk about schools, and old work colleagues, and the graffiti carved into the desks.
Someone lifts her up from the sofa. She knows the softness of those shirts and the warm smell and the strong arms holding her. The same arms that picked her up as though she was weightless and held her on his shoulders.
"Dad?" Perhaps she is dying. It doesn't make any sense. There is a coolness to the air, and she is carried through it. Her body is lowered into the ground, but then her knees touch something and her hands slip away from the shoulders, and she is pushed gently into a seat.
"There you go." he whispers. She clings to him, gripping his shirt between her fingers, strange tears against her lashes, a sob that rises from her throat. "Hey, it's alright." He wraps his arms around her more firmly.
"I love you, Dad."
"I love you too, sweetheart." It makes her sob, in the passenger seat of her aunt's car, on the driveway of a quiet suburban street. "Lil, I love you too." She believes him.
He pulls away once she has stopped crying, a large damp patch across his shoulder.
It feels all wrong.
She turns to the woman in the seat beside her.
"Can I stay?" A bemused smile.
"Stay here?" She nods, studies the gulping swallow and a halfway-convincing nod. "Course." The smile is adjusted, brightened, artificial to its core. There is still a choice between two homes, two beds, two duvet covers.
"You can stay too, Rach." her father says, leaning on the doorframe.
"Oh." The car keys flutter between Rachel's fingers as she looks down at them. "No, it's okay." The fake smile persists. More fumbling with the car keys. "Alright, darling, let me know when you want picking up."
Lily stares at the air vents. She thinks about her mother, and anger, and the school Christmas fairs, and the word 'clingy', and the Christmas tree she persuaded Auntie Rachel to get, and the special vegan Christmas dinner, and the stocking Auntie Rachel dug out of the loft and left by the fireplace. She thinks about how this game is set up for her to fail.
"Okay." She fastens the seatbelt over her stomach.
"Okay what?" She shrugs at the windscreen. "Lils, you going to stay with Dad?" Her throat burns, her legs fold into her chest, her face shrinks behind her arms. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" This is spoilt, childish, immature.
"Why can't you just be friends?"
"Who?"
"You two."
"You- We are friends?" Her aunt furrows her brow at the tired, watery eyes. "We are friends, Lils."
"So why's…" She hides the mucus running over her lip behind her knees so that her aunt won't be disgusted by her. Perhaps she would deserve it, perhaps she will stay and regress with her father into the wilderness of her childhood.
"You can stay with Dad, of course you can." The collar or her top is flattened at the back of her neck by two deft fingers. "We'll have our Christmas another day, Lils, it's not a problem." Her cheeks sting with the tears. "Oh, Lils, what is it?" And she isn't a child. She can't keep overreacting like this. She mustn't.
Her fingers feel for the seatbelt catch at her side and press it down. The buckle slides across her stomach as she wipes her face with her sleeve.
"Okay."
She knows her aunt well enough to see the hazy disappointment.
"You just text me and let me know when you want picking up, alright?"
She nods robotically. "Happy Christmas then, Lils." A kiss against her temple, a weak hug. "Love you, sweetheart." The words tickle the inside of her ear. She nods again, then gets out of the car.
Her body jolts with the handbrake, her eyes close, a heavy sigh, her body crumples into the seat. It was silly to anticipate anything else. She'd had visions of filling her niece's stocking in the early hours of the morning and watching her open it a few hours later, of walking over well-trodden paths, of curling up on the sofa with her under a blanket, of…
It doesn't matter.
She will have toast for lunch and pretend it isn't Christmas. It is important that Lily spends time with her family.
The tarmac driveway, small shrubs she doesn't know the names of illuminated by LED lights, boots on the doormat, and a Christmas tree that Lily had pleaded for glowing back at her.
Her bed is empty, and the sheets are cold. She turns out the light and climbs in anyway. The little white rabbit presses into her hip. She rolls her eyes, and the lights snap back on.
It sits beside her in the passenger seat. She thinks she could fit it through the letter box.
She waits on the doorstep, in the rain, with a plush rabbit hanging from her fingers.
"Rach."
"I-" He stares back at her in his pyjamas, grey and tired, and still-
Purple socks on the stairs and footsteps like thunder and a small body slamming into her.
"I thought you might not come back." There are arms tightening around her. "I thought that you weren't going to come back then." Lily whispers, relief evaporating from her.
"Oh." She can feel it, the worry that has constrained her lungs gently melting away.
"Do you want- I could sleep on the sofa?" Eddie offers. Rachel shakes her head, stumbles backward against the weight of her niece.
"Oh, no, I-"
"She can stay in my room." The little white rabbit is flattened against the back of her niece's jumper, unnoticed.
"Yeah." she whispers. "We can share, can't we, darling?"
The glow of the streetlight floods in through the blinds, casting a yellowy glow over the furniture. An empty shelf, a set of wooden drawers with dents at shoe-level, a wardrobe with a cluster of stickers Lily has collected from the skins of apples. The wallpaper peels away at the edges, its bright pink glare has faded with the sun.
"Happy birthday." Lily mumbles into her shoulder.
"Happy Christmas?" she whispers back.
"Mm."
"Happy Christmas to you too, darling."