Nevertheless, I distribute extra blankets and duvets before bed, limping from door to door with a torch clamped under my elbow, clutching armfuls of the spare bedding we keep for emergencies, along with thermos flasks of hot chocolate.

I’m about to knock on the second-to-last door when Danny, trailing behind me with a stack of blankets, says, “Erin, mate—” with a warning note in his voice.

And I stop. It’s Eva’s door.

And somehow that one simple thing catches me like a blow to the stomach, a reminder of the reality of what has happened here. An avalanche. A death. Will Perce-Neige ever recover from these twin disasters? It’s hard to imagine people reading news like this in their Sunday paper and then turning to book a holiday, but then, St. Antoine isn’t the first alpine resort to experience tragedy in the form of an avalanche. It happens almost every year, in fact there was another, similar fall just up the road earlier in the season.

“Mate?” Danny says, and I realize I have stopped stock-still, lost in thought.

“Sorry,” I say stupidly. “I—I wasn’t keeping track—I—”

“You all right?” Danny asks uneasily. “You should be sitting down, I’m not happy about you walking on that ankle.”

“I’m fine,” I say shortly. The truth is that my ankle is hurting. A lot. Danny’s probably right, and I shouldn’t be putting weight on it. But I can’t bear to sit alone and silent in the darkness of the staff quarters, feeling it throb, thinking about what’s happened and what’s going to happen. I’m better off working; somehow the endless tasks keep my thoughts at bay. Plus, more practically, guest interaction isn’t Danny’s strong suit. They’ve forgiven him for his tactlessness in the wake of the avalanche, at least I hope they have, but our roles are firmly back in place now. We’re here to be polite, good hosts, even in these circumstances. Perhaps especially in these circumstances. It feels like everything is crumbling—and our ordained roles are the only thing we have left to hang on to. Danny and I must remain in charge. If we don’t keep that authority, if we let Topher take over—well, I don’t like to think about how the situation could play out.

There’s just one door left. Topher’s. And I hitch my armful of blankets a little higher before I knock.

He’s drunk, I can tell that when the door opens. He’s wearing a robe, open to the waist in spite of the cold, and holding a bottle. And he’s not alone. With the overhead light out, I can’t see who’s inside, but I’ve got a horrible feeling it might be little Ani, who didn’t open her door when I knocked a few minutes ago. I want to tell her the answer to her distress over Eva doesn’t lie in Topher’s bed—but I can’t. It’s none of my business. She’s the same age as me, she’s a guest, not a friend, and I have no right to tell her what to do, even if I think she’s making a fairly huge mistake.

“Ellen,” he slurs. “Why hello. What brings you to my room at this late hour? It’s a bit late to be tucking people in.”

“Extra blankets,” I say with my best cheerful smile. “Just in case the temperature drops overnight. Can’t have you all freezing to death on my watch.”

“I’ll tell you a secret…” Topher leans in, confidentially, his robe gaping to show a smattering of dark blond chest hair. “The best survival kit is a naked woman.”

Oh, ffs.

I can feel my smile thin.

“Well, I’m afraid the service doesn’t extend to that.”

“I’ve already got that part sorted,” he says, but he reaches out for the blankets I’m holding, swaying slightly as he does.

I’m about to turn and leave when he says, out of the blue, “Don’t I know you?”

“I don’t think so,” I say firmly.

“No, I do… I’ve seen you somewhere before. Did you waitress in London before you came here?”

“Sadly, no.”

“I do,” he persists. “I know you. I’ve thought it since I first arrived.”

“Mate, she said she doesn’t know you, and you’re pissed,” Danny breaks in, pushing past my shoulder to stand in front of me. Topher steps forward too, his expression turning ugly in less time than it takes for me to think, Oh shit.

Danny bunches his fists, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords, and for a minute the two men just stand there, chest to chest. I feel my heart thudding. Danny cannot hit Topher. He will get fired.

But Topher knows when he’s on thin ice, and it’s he who steps back, with a laugh that’s just the right side of ingratiating.

“My mistake. Mate.”

And then he closes the door, and Danny and I are left standing, looking at each other, wondering how much longer this can go on, before the ice cracks.

LIZ

Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1

When I wake up, it is cold. That is the first thing I notice. It is a sharp contrast to yesterday, when I woke with a dry mouth and the feeling of having slept all night in a room a few degrees warmer than my bedroom at home.

I reach out and take a sip of the water on my bedside table. It is chilled, as if it has been in the fridge.

Under the extra duvets Erin dropped off I am still relatively comfortable, but I am not looking forward to getting dressed. In the end I reach out and grab the complimentary toweling robe off the end of the bed, dragging it under the covers with me to warm up before I put it on. I remember doing the same thing in my childhood bedroom when I was growing up, pulling my school uniform under the covers to get dressed. The room was in a badly converted loft, and in winter it was almost like sleeping outdoors. When I woke in the morning and breathed out, there would be a cloud of white hanging in the air. At night the moisture used to condense on the sloping ceiling and then freeze, so that I would wake to little runnels of ice on the wall above me. This is not as bad as that. I am in a luxurious chalet, not a Victorian terrace in Crawley, for a start. But as far as temperature goes, it is still painfully chilly.

I pick up my phone and peer at the screen. It is 7:19. The battery is down to 15 percent but I barely have time to worry about that fact because I am distracted by something.

I have a notification.

At some point in the night my phone has managed to connect to the internet. The reception is gone now, the bars grayed out to zero, but that notification is still there, proving that at least for a moment, there was a flicker of connection.

The second surprise is that it is from Snoop. I never get notifications from Snoop. You only get a notification if you get a new subscriber to your feed, and I never do.

Only… now I have. At some point in the night, someone snooped me. I’m not even sure how, since I wasn’t listening to anything. I had no idea that was possible. Although maybe when the Wi-Fi connected it somehow restarted my stream where I left off, just for a minute?

The realization gives me an odd feeling. There is no way to know who it was—you can only see who is snooping you in real time; once they log off the connection is severed, only the number remains. Then I dismiss the issue from my mind. In all probability it was a bot or a server glitch, or someone mistyping the ID of someone they actually wanted to follow.