“What are you saying?” Rik is looking wary.

“I remember reading about it in the alumnae newsletter. Alex FitzClarence died in an avalanche in the alps with his best friend, Will Hamilton. The only survivor was Will’s girlfriend, Erin FitzClarence.”

“Topher.” Miranda is looking as alarmed as Rik now. “Topher, what are you getting at?”

“I’m saying, this isn’t the first time our little Erin has been involved in a fatal skiing accident.”

ERIN

Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 10

“Danny!” There is no answer, but I know he’s in there. “Danny, please, I’m sorry. Please let me explain.” I bang on his door for maybe the twentieth or thirtieth time, but without much hope now. It’s clear he doesn’t want to open up.

Only then he does.

“This had better be good,” he says, and his expression makes me quail, it’s so angry.

“Danny, I’m sorry,” I say again, desperately.

“You said you were going to explain.” He folds his arms, his fury barely contained. “So go on then. Explain. Explain why you lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie to you—”

He begins to shut the door in my face.

“Hey!” I cry, and instinctively I shove my foot in the gap, forgetting that it’s my bad ankle. The door crunches on it, and I let out a scream of pure agony. Danny claps his hands to his mouth.

“Holy shit, Erin, I’m sorry—I’m so, so sorry—it’s fine!” he bellows, knowing that the others are probably jumping up in panic, attuned to the worst-case scenario. “Erin’s fine, she just knocked her ankle.”

“I’m fine,” I call croakily, blinking away the sudden tears of pain that have started into my eyes, and whether they believe us, or they can’t hear anything through the staff door, no one comes running.

Either way, something has broken in the deadlock between us, because Danny opens the door wider and jerks his head at his bed.

“You better come in. Take the weight off.”

I hobble meekly inside and sit down.

There is a long silence.

“So?” Danny says at last. Every muscle in his body screams antagonism, but at least I’ve been offered the chance to explain.

“You’re right,” I say. “Even if I didn’t lie to you, I didn’t exactly tell you the truth.”

“I thought we were friends,” Danny says, and although the anger is fading from his kind, crumpled face, what’s left is worse—bewildered hurt. “I thought—I thought you and me was on the same side.”

“We were—we are,” I say desperately. “This doesn’t change anything. Everything I told you—about me, about dropping out of uni—it’s all true. I just didn’t tell you why.”

“Why then?” Danny says. He folds his arms and leans back against his little chest of drawers, letting me know with his body language that this isn’t going to be that easy. I’ve got a hole to dig myself out of.

I swallow. I haven’t talked to anyone about this—not since the nightmare days and weeks after the accident. But I owe Danny the truth.

“It’s true my dad’s a marquess,” I say. “But honestly, Danny, it sounds a hell of a lot grander than it is. He doesn’t live in a castle. My family isn’t particularly well-off. Alex went to boarding school, but I went to the local comprehensive because my parents couldn’t afford two sets of fees; I’m no different from you.”

He gives me a look at that, as if to say, Fuck off are you, and I wince, knowing he’s right. Danny grew up on a council estate on the outskirts of Portsmouth, the only child of a single mum who struggled for years to make ends meet. He has pulled himself up by his bootstraps, with no help from anyone. However far the FitzClarence fortunes have fallen, our upbringings were different, and that’s the truth. To pretend otherwise is pretty insulting.

“Okay, I’m sorry, that—that was clumsy. It’s not what I meant. I just meant—I’m trying to explain—”

I stop. I put my head in my hands. This is all I need. Danny was the one person on my side, the one person I felt I could rely on. Have I really screwed all that up, thanks to Topher?

“When I was nineteen,” I begin again, more slowly this time, “I went on a skiing holiday with my boyfriend, Will, and my brother, Alex, Will’s best friend. We were skiing off-piste, and we were stupid. We got caught in a—” I swallow. I don’t know how to talk about this, how to explain the horror of what happened. Words aren’t enough.

“We got caught in an avalanche,” I say at last, forcing the word out. “We triggered it. We were all wearing avalanche packs, but Alex didn’t manage to set his off. Will’s deployed, but it didn’t save him, he was buried too deep, and I couldn’t dig him out fast enough. I was the only person who survived.”

I stop. I can’t go on. I can’t describe those nightmarish hours on the mountain, sobbing as I dug with numb bleeding hands through the hard-packed drifts to try to reach Will, who was trapped head down beneath a hundredweight of snow and ice. I dug and I wept, and I wept and I dug, using anything I could find in my pack—my lift pass, my water bottle, anything that could form a makeshift pick, for my poles and skis were long gone, ripped away from me somewhere far up the slope.

It was too late. I knew that. I had known it even before I began to dig, I think, and as the hours wore on, and the snow lay all around in unmoving silence, I somehow found the strength to accept it. But still I dug. Not just for Will, but for my own survival. Because Will had the GPS locator beacon in his pack. And if I didn’t activate it, I would die along with him.

The search and rescue eventually found us. Or rather, they found me. By the time they arrived I was hypothermic, cradling Will’s dead body. Alex was not recovered until the following spring.

“I—I couldn’t go back,” I say, very quietly. “Do you understand that? I couldn’t go back to my old life. It was completely meaningless. I went home to bury Will, and then I came back to the mountains—at first because I couldn’t bear to leave without Alex, and then afterwards because…”

I stop. The truth is, I don’t know why I stayed. Only that I couldn’t stand to be at home, with the pity of all my friends suffocating me, and my parents’ awful, crushing grief. And it seemed like a kind of penance to stay here, among the terrible austere beauty of the Alps, to keep forcing myself to look at the mountains that had killed Will and Alex.

“That’s why you don’t ski off-piste,” Danny says hoarsely. He is looking at me very differently now. The anger has gone. There is only a kind of… pity left. It hurts to see it in his face, and I turn away, nodding.

“Yes, that’s why. I still love skiing—which is perverse, I know. My parents think I’m crazy. My dad called me a masochist when I took this job. But I can’t seem to bring myself to leave the mountains, and you can’t live here year-round without skiing. But I don’t think I’ll ever go off-piste again.”