Eleanor winced as Will's lips pecked her hair. He smelled of alcohol.

"Bye for now," he said cheerily as he pulled on his coat. "I'm off."

She turned round in her seat, hands grasping the back of her chair. "Where are you going?"

For a second, Eleanor thought her brother hesitated. But it was gone as soon as it came. "Oh, you know. Just for a little walk."

Eleanor turned back round and dipped her soldier into the egg, knowing perfectly well what he meant. "Okay. Be safe. Come back soon."

The door clicked shut gently.

Eleanor sighed. This was the seventh 'walk' Will had gone on in the past week, ever since their father had died. But she knew what he was going to do. He would sit in a park somewhere and inject himself with some lethal poison, live in bliss for a few hours, maybe scribble some psychedelic poetry in his journal, and then come crashing back down to earth in a cloud of depression. He constantly needed a rush but she couldn't blame him. He was getting over it, still trying to cope with the loss.

The loss that she'd caused.

Once again, Eleanor felt the tears coming. She couldn't fight them. They spilt out of her eyes, warm and salty. This time, she thought back to the knife. She couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe what she'd done. The knife had stuck out at such a strange angle. She had a sudden thought that she could pull out a protractor and measure it in her mind's eye. She could write a thesis on it – the perfect angle of murder.

She'd done it. Murdered. But she hadn't meant to.

Shaking, Eleanor cleared her plate away and trailed upstairs. She avoided her room; she couldn't bear to go in there, face looking at her murdering self in the full-length mirror – they'd removed the black cloth from the house this morning. Instead, she headed for Will's. If there was a place she felt safest, it was in her brother's bedroom.

Bursting into the room, she threw herself on his trashed bed – he never made it, said it was pointless. What is the point of being tidy, he'd said, if you can be messy? She clutched the duvet, drew it to her face, felt the sobs overtaking her, overwhelming her.

Eleanor breathed in. She caught a whiff of something, something that made her nose wrinkle but she couldn't pinpoint what it was. However, when she sniffed again, the duvet smelt like Will. Not the junkie Will, but the Will who surrounded himself with books while she surrounded herself with equations, who read until his eyes blurred while she tapped numbers into a calculator until her fingers hurt, who blabbed on about obscure literature and liked to recite Shakespeare's sonnets by heart while she forced herself to memorise long lists of equations. She liked that Will, the one who contrasted her, and the smell reminded her of the old him. It comforted her, made her feel safe, surrounded by a bubble where no one could touch her ever again.