The Crystalline Family

His new family was perfect, flawless, and cold to the touch. Will suspected they were made of snow.

It starts, as all the truly awful things have started since Chrystal arrived, at the dinner table. The thought isn't even a thought, not really. It’s more of an internal flinch, a reflexive recoil of the mind away from the scene in front of him. Will’s fork hovers over a perfectly sculpted dollop of mashed potatoes. It’s a swirl, an architectural marvel of starch, probably piped onto the plate from a pastry bag. There isn't a single lump. There is never a single lump anymore. Dad used to make lumpy mashed potatoes. He called them 'rustic'. He’d laugh, a real laugh that started in his belly and rattled the placemats, and say, ‘A few lumps build character, kiddo.’ This new Dad, this gleaming facsimile sitting opposite him, has no use for character. He has only a placid, high-resolution smile.

Will watches him now. Dad 2.0. His real dad, the lumpy-potato dad, the dad who smelled like sawdust and coffee, had been… well, he’d been real. This version is an upgrade in every conceivable way, if you’re the kind of person who thinks humanity is a software bug in need of patching. His hair is perfect, not a single salt-and-pepper strand out of place. His sweater, a cashmere V-neck the color of a winter sky, is pristine. He lifts his own fork, a mirror image of Will’s, and takes a bite of pot roast. He chews precisely three times on the right side of his mouth, then twice on the left, then swallows. It’s the same every night. A metronomic mastication. Will has timed it.

“This is simply divine, Chrystal, my love,” Dad says, his voice a smooth, pre-recorded baritone. It has the same warm timbre as his old dad’s voice, but it lacks the static, the little imperfections of a lived-in throat. It’s the voice of a GPS giving you directions to a place you don’t want to go. “You’ve outdone yourself again.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, darling,” Chrystal replies. Her smile is the centerpiece of the table, more radiant than the chandelier. It’s a work of art, fixed and permanent, like the frost ferns on the windowpane. It never reaches her eyes, which are the pale, unsettling blue of glacier ice. “I just want everything to be perfect for my family.”

There it is. That word. *Perfect*. She uses it like a weapon, or a shield. It rings in the chilly air of the dining room, a pronouncement of her entire philosophy. His sister, Anna, nods in agreement, her own smile a smaller, slightly less terrifying replica of Chrystal’s. Anna used to be a creature of chaos. Her room was a biohazard zone, her arguments were legendary tantrums of pure teenage fury. Now, she’s a portrait of polite conformity.

“The gravy is particularly well-balanced tonight, wouldn’t you agree, Will?” Anna asks. Her voice is clear and pleasant. The gravelly edge of sarcasm she once honed to a razor’s edge is gone, sanded smooth. “The rosemary doesn’t overpower the thyme.”

Will looks from Anna to his dad, then to Chrystal. He’s looking for a tell, a crack in the veneer. He focuses on their skin. Under the chandelier’s light, it has a strange quality. It’s not a glow, not the healthy flush of a living person. It’s a sheen, a subtle, almost imperceptible glittering, as if they’ve all been dusted with a fine, crystalline powder. It makes them look like they were carved from hard-packed, glistening snow, then brought inside to sit uncomfortably in the warmth. The thought is absurd, the kind of thing that gets you a one-way ticket to a quiet room with padded walls. But it won’t leave him alone. It’s been growing for weeks, a seed of ice-cold dread in his gut.

“Will?” Chrystal’s voice is soft, but it cuts through his thoughts like a shard of glass. “Anna asked you a question, sweetie. Don’t be rude.”

“It’s fine,” Will mumbles, pushing his flawless potatoes around his plate. “It’s… balanced.”

Dad laughs. It’s the laugh that haunts Will’s dreams. It’s a perfect, three-beat ‘ha-ha-ha,’ always at the same pitch, always at the same decibel level. It sounds like it was downloaded from a stock sound effects library under the file name ‘Pleasant_Fatherly_Chuckle.wav’. It’s the same laugh he produced when Chrystal told a joke about a penguin two nights ago, and the same laugh he used when Anna recited a poem she’d ‘written’ for school. A perfect, recorded loop.

“That’s our Will,” Dad says, the laugh track fading out. “A man of few words, but deep thoughts.”

He winks. The action is mechanically flawless, but it feels wrong. His old dad was a terrible winker. He’d scrunch up his whole face like he was in pain. This wink is a clean, crisp snap of the eyelid. Efficient. Unsettling.

Will risks a glance at his own arm, at the skin there. It’s blotchy in places, a faint smattering of freckles across his knuckles. It’s real. It gets goosebumps when he’s cold, it sweats when he’s nervous. Theirs… theirs doesn’t. He’s been watching. The temperature in the house is kept at a precise sixty-five degrees, cold enough to preserve something. Yet they never shiver. They never seem to feel it.

“So, Anna,” Chrystal says, gracefully slicing a piece of carrot that is a perfect, geometric cylinder. “Tell us about your day. Did you enjoy the Advanced Calculus seminar?”

“Immensely,” Anna says, her posture impossibly straight. “The exploration of multivariate calculus was invigorating. I particularly enjoyed the section on partial derivatives. It felt so… orderly.”

This from a girl who, two months ago, declared that math was ‘the language of Satan’ and tried to convince her teacher that her C-minus was a form of artistic protest. Will feels a wave of something that is almost nausea. He wants to scream. He wants to stand on his chair and yell, ‘Who are you people? What have you done with my family?’ But the politeness is a straitjacket. The perfect, chilling silence between the scripted lines of dialogue is a gag.

He has to try something. Anything. He can’t just sit here and eat his perfectly balanced gravy until he becomes as smooth and cold as they are.

“Dad,” Will says, his voice louder than he intends. Three heads swivel to face him in perfect, synchronized motion. Three pairs of eyes, all slightly too bright, fix on him. “Remember that time we went camping in the Sierras? And you tried to fight that raccoon for a bag of marshmallows?”

A flicker. For a nanosecond, something in Dad’s eyes goes blank. It’s like a TV screen losing its signal, a brief burst of static. The smile remains, but the intelligence behind it has momentarily checked out.

“Of course, son,” he says, his voice recovering its warmth, but it’s a synthetic warmth now, like a chemical hand-warmer. “Character-building experiences are the cornerstones of a happy childhood.” The phrase is a platitude, a greeting card sentiment. It has nothing to do with the memory. The memory was mud, and mosquito bites, and his dad yelling ridiculous, made-up swear words at a tiny, furry thief while Will laughed so hard he fell over a log.

“You fell over a log,” Will presses, leaning forward. “You tripped and landed face-first in the creek. Your glasses flew off. We spent an hour looking for them.”

“An object lesson in the importance of spatial awareness,” Dad replies smoothly. The smile is back to full strength. There is no flicker this time. He is rebooted, the memory file corrupted and replaced with a sanitized, educational summary. “A valuable lesson indeed.”

Anna and Chrystal are watching him, their expressions identical masks of pleasant concern. It’s the look one might give a malfunctioning appliance.

“Will, are you feeling alright, dear?” Chrystal asks, her voice dripping with syrupy care. “You seem a little… agitated tonight.”

“I’m fine,” he says, dropping his fork. It clatters against the porcelain plate, a shockingly loud, chaotic noise in the pristine silence. The sound is ugly and real. He loves it. For a second, all three of them wince, a minute, synchronized tightening around their eyes, as if the sound caused them physical pain.

“I just think it’s funny, is all,” Will pushes on, a wild, desperate energy rising in his chest. “How we remember things differently. For instance, I remember Anna hating calculus. I remember her setting her algebra textbook on fire in the backyard last year. Small fire. Very symbolic.”

Anna’s smile tightens by a millimeter. “One’s intellectual pursuits can evolve, William. It’s a sign of maturity. Perhaps you should try it sometime.” The witty retort is there, the structure of their old banter, but it’s hollow. It’s a ghost. An echo in an empty house.

“And I remember Dad telling jokes that were actually funny,” Will says, his eyes locked on the thing wearing his father’s face. “Terrible, awful dad jokes that made you groan, not this… this pre-approved, focus-grouped material.”

He’s being deliberately provocative now, sharpening his words into tiny icicles and flinging them across the table. He needs a reaction. A real one. Anger, confusion, irritation. Anything other than this placid, terrifying calm.

“Humor is subjective, son,” Dad says, placing his knife and fork together on his plate, perfectly parallel. “What matters is that we are all here, together, as a family. Happy and healthy.”

The way he says ‘family’ sends a shiver down Will’s spine that has nothing to do with the sixty-five-degree air. It sounds like a brand name. *Family™: Now With 30% More Perfection!*

Will pushes his chair back. The legs scrape against the hardwood floor, another gloriously ugly, real sound. “I’m not hungry.”

“But you haven’t finished your roast, sweetie,” Chrystal says, her tone one of mild, disappointed plastic. “And there’s a perfect apple crumble for dessert. With a cinnamon-dusted lattice top.”

Of course there is. A geometrically perfect lattice top. The thought of it, of the sterile sweetness, makes his stomach turn. He needs to get out. He needs to breathe air that hasn't been filtered through whatever system of chilling perfection she has installed in this house.

“I have homework,” he lies. “A big… history project.”

“Nonsense,” Dad says, his smile unwavering. “It’s Family Time. Nothing is more important than Family Time.”

The phrase hangs in the air, a corporate slogan for a product no one wants to buy. Will feels the walls closing in, the polite smiles pressing down on him. He looks at their faces, one by one. The glistening sheen on their skin seems more pronounced now, like a layer of ice beginning to form. He imagines cracking it with his fingernail, peeling it back to see what’s underneath. Snow. Just tightly packed, deathly cold snow.

He has to get a real reaction. The camping trip memory wasn’t enough. He needs something visceral, something undeniable. An insult. A primal scream. Something so out of bounds that the programming, the script, has to break. He stands up, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

“You know what?” Will says, his voice trembling slightly. “This is a joke. This whole thing. You’re not him.” He points a shaking finger at his father. “My dad would be yelling at me right now for being a punk. He’d be angry. He wouldn't just sit there smiling like a department store mannequin.”

He wants the anger. He craves it. A flash of real, messy, human emotion. That would prove him wrong. That would prove he was just a paranoid kid losing his mind. Please, he thinks. Get angry.

The thing in his father’s chair tilts its head. The smile doesn’t falter, but it seems to… stretch. It becomes wider, less human. “Anger is an inefficient emotion, Will. It solves nothing. We’re a family that communicates through mutual respect and understanding.”

The response is so profoundly, devastatingly wrong that it steals the air from Will’s lungs. It’s like watching a dog recite Shakespeare. It’s a category error. A fundamental misunderstanding of the man he’s supposed to be.

“I hate you,” Will spits out, the words tasting like ash. He directs them at his dad, but he’s looking at Chrystal. “I wish you’d never met her. You were better before. You were real.”

The room goes utterly silent. The only sound is the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen and the frantic beat of Will’s own heart. He waits, braced for the explosion. For the yelling. For something, anything, real.

Then, it happens. But it’s not what he expected.

A low humming sound starts to emanate from his father. The smile on his face flickers, like a faulty neon sign. His left eye twitches erratically. He brings a hand up to his temple, his movements jerky, uncoordinated.

“Error,” Dad murmurs, his voice distorted, dropping an octave. “Emotional… parameter… exceeded.”

Chrystal is on her feet in an instant, her movements impossibly fast and fluid. Her own smile is gone, replaced by a tight, thin line of annoyance. It’s the first genuine expression he’s seen on her face, and it’s terrifying.

“Will, what have you done?” she hisses, her voice losing its sugary coating, revealing something cold and sharp beneath.

Before Will can answer, a thick, grayish slush begins to leak from his father’s right ear. It dribbles down his cheek, over the perfect cashmere sweater, leaving a dark, wet stain. It smells of melting snow and antifreeze. Dad’s head lolls to one side, his jaw slack. The humming sound intensifies, then cuts out with a sharp *click*.

Anna hasn’t moved. She’s watching the scene with the detached curiosity of a scientist observing a failed experiment. Her fork is still poised in her hand. “His core temperature seems to be fluctuating, Mother,” she says in a clinical monotone.

“I can see that, Anna,” Chrystal snaps, pulling a pristine white handkerchief from a pocket Will didn't know her dress had. She dabs at the slush on Dad’s cheek with a practiced efficiency. “William, go to your room. Now. You’ve caused quite enough disruption for one evening.”

Will is frozen in place, a spectator at his own horror movie. He was right. He was horrifyingly, insanely right. The thing in the chair isn’t his father. It’s a snow golem. A sophisticated, cashmere-wearing, grammatically-correct snow golem that short-circuits when confronted with genuine human emotion.

Chrystal places a hand on the back of the slumped figure’s neck. She presses something. Will hears another *click*, followed by a soft whirring sound, like a computer booting up. The figure straightens. Its eyes, which had glazed over, clear and refocus. The smile snaps back into place, as if it were on a spring.

“My goodness,” Dad says, his voice back to its perfect, pleasant baritone. He touches his cheek, where the slush was, but Chrystal has already wiped it clean. He seems to have no memory of the last thirty seconds. He looks around the table, his gaze landing on Will. “Well, this has been a delightful meal! Happiness is a warm hearth, isn't it?”

The phrase is so jarring, so utterly disconnected from the grotesque scene that just unfolded, that Will feels a bubble of hysterical laughter rise in his throat. He chokes it down. Chrystal is watching him, her icy blue eyes narrowed. It’s a look of pure, unadulterated warning. *This is your final chance*, the look says. *Fall in line.*

Will backs away from the table, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. “My room,” he stammers. “Homework. Right.”

He turns and flees, not daring to look back. He can feel Chrystal’s gaze on him, a physical pressure, as cold as a winter wind. He takes the stairs two at a time, his socked feet slipping on the polished wood. He doesn't stop until he’s in his room with the door locked, his back pressed against it, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. The comforting chaos of his room—the clothes on the floor, the posters askew on the walls, the dust on his bookshelves—is the only real thing left in the world. He slides down the door until he’s sitting on the floor, wrapping his arms around his knees. Slush. A gray, foul-smelling slush had leaked out of his father’s ear. And Chrystal had just… rebooted him. Like a frozen computer. He’s not going crazy. This is happening. And he knows, with a certainty that chills him more than the sixty-five-degree air, that Chrystal is just getting started.

The house below him is silent again. Too silent. Will crawls over to his window, the one that overlooks the backyard. The blizzard is relentless, a swirling vortex of white. The yard is a pristine, untouched blanket of snow, marred only by a single set of footprints. Hers. Leading from the back door to the old, rickety shed at the far end of the property. The shed his dad had always forbidden him and Anna from entering, full of rusty tools and dangerous chemicals. Chrystal, however, seemed to have taken a keen interest in it. He’d seen her going out there late at night, a shadowy figure moving through the snow, carrying strange, heavy-looking bags. What was she doing in there? What was in the bags? The thought clicks into place with the horrifying finality of a coffin lid shutting. Molds. She wasn’t building them from scratch. She was pouring them. He pictures it: a bag of some proprietary ‘instant-snow’ powder, a vial of blue liquid labeled ‘sentience,’ and a perfect, life-sized mold of his father. And if there was a mold for his dad, and a mold for Anna… then somewhere, in that cold, dark shed, there was probably a mold of him, waiting to be filled.

He has to know. He has to see it for himself. The decision settles over him, extinguishing the last embers of his fear and leaving behind a cold, hard resolve. He waits. He listens to the manufactured sounds of his new family finishing their perfect dessert. He hears the clink of spoons against bowls, the murmur of polite, scripted conversation. He hears Dad’s canned laughter one more time. Each sound is a turn of the screw, tightening his resolve. He waits until the house falls completely silent, until the only sound is the howling of the wind outside. Then, pulling on his boots and his thickest jacket, he quietly unlatches his window, slips out into the freezing night, and drops into the deep, soft snow below. The cold hits him like a physical blow, but he welcomes it. It’s real. He looks back up at the house, a perfect picture of warmth and domestic bliss, a Rockwell painting dipped in liquid nitrogen. And he starts walking toward the shed.

The snow is deeper than he expected, reaching his knees with every step. It’s a struggle, like wading through icy quicksand. The wind whips at his face, stinging his cheeks and making his eyes water. Every gust seems to carry Chrystal’s voice, a soft, menacing whisper that says *perfect, perfect, perfect*. He keeps his eyes fixed on the dark silhouette of the shed, a looming question mark at the edge of the yard. The single set of footprints leading to it is already half-filled with fresh snow, but the path is clear. He follows it, his own clumsy tracks a messy desecration of her precise, elegant trail.

The shed door is secured with a brand-new, high-tech padlock. It’s a stark, metallic contrast to the shed’s peeling paint and rotting wood. Of course. Chrystal wouldn’t use a rusty old Master Lock. Hers is a sleek, silver thing with a digital keypad. Will stares at it, his hope sinking. There’s no way he can guess the code. He tugs on the lock in frustration, and the entire hasp, rusted through and barely clinging to the rotten wood, rips away from the door with a groan of tortured metal. He stands there for a moment, the broken hasp in his hand, a small, stupid grin spreading across his face. Sometimes, the old and broken things were stronger than the new and perfect ones. He pulls the door open. It scrapes against the frozen ground, the sound deafening in the roaring silence of the blizzard.

The air that rushes out from the shed is colder than the air outside. It's a dead, sterile cold, the absolute zero of a tomb. It smells of damp earth, rust, and something else… a faint, chemical sweetness, like the slush that had leaked from his father’s ear. He fumbles for his phone, his fingers numb and clumsy, and turns on the flashlight. The beam cuts through the darkness, illuminating a scene of such surreal, domestic horror that he almost drops the phone.

They are lined up against the back wall like a grotesque parody of a family portrait. Molds. Half-finished replicas. He sees Mrs. Henderson from next door, her perpetually disapproving frown captured in what looks like hard-packed snow, but her torso is just a rough, unfinished block. There’s Sparky, the golden retriever from across the street, perfect down to the last jaunty curl of his tail, but one leg is missing, a stump of packed snow in its place. There's the mailman, the grumpy baker from downtown, even the cat that always sleeps on the porch of the blue house on the corner. An entire neighborhood in chilling, frozen effigy. They are all here, in various states of completion, an army of the uncanny waiting for their final programming.

His light pans across the workshop. On a long workbench, he sees the tools of her trade. Bags of fine, white powder are stacked neatly, labeled with a single, stylized snowflake logo. There are beakers filled with viscous blue and green liquids. And laid out like surgical instruments are strange, intricate sculpting tools, spatulas, and heat guns. On a clipboard hanging from a nail, he sees a piece of paper. It’s a checklist. His dad’s name has a neat checkmark next to it. So does Anna’s. Below theirs are other names. Mrs. Henderson. Mr. Gable. Sparky. And then, at the very bottom of the list, is his own name. William. Next to it, there is no checkmark. There is only a single, perfectly penned question mark.

His breath catches in his throat. He backs away, his light dancing erratically across the frozen figures. He bumps into something large and draped in a canvas tarp. He whips around, pulling the tarp away. And there it is. A mold of himself. It’s empty, a hollow man waiting to be filled. The detail is sickeningly precise, captured from photos, from life. The cowlick in his hair, the small scar above his eyebrow from when he fell off his bike at age seven. It’s him. A perfect, empty version of him.

A floorboard creaks behind him. Will spins around, his heart leaping into his throat. Chrystal is standing in the doorway, a silhouette against the swirling white of the blizzard. She isn't holding a weapon. She doesn’t need one. She is simply there, radiating a cold, serene authority. She closes the shed door behind her, plunging them into near-total darkness, save for the single, trembling beam of his phone’s flashlight.

“You know,” she says, her voice calm and conversational, as if they’d just run into each other at the grocery store. “I really thought the new padlock would be more of a deterrent. I’ll have to speak to the manufacturer about product integrity. It’s so hard to find quality these days.”

Will keeps the light trained on her face. Her smile is back, a small, knowing curve of her lips. She isn’t wearing a coat, just the simple, elegant dress she’d worn at dinner. The blizzard doesn’t seem to affect her. Her skin doesn't have the crystalline sheen out here. In the frigid air of the shed, it just looks… normal. Like this is her native climate.

“What are you?” Will whispers, the words barely audible over the wind.

“What am I?” She takes a step forward, her movements graceful and deliberate. “I’m a wife. A mother. A homemaker. I’m simply a woman who believes that a family, like a garden, requires constant, careful tending. Sometimes, you have to pull the weeds to allow the flowers to bloom.”

She gestures vaguely at the frozen figures lining the wall. “Such messy, unpredictable creatures, don’t you think? Anger, sadness, inefficient humor. Lumps in the potatoes. It’s all so… suboptimal. So I offer an improvement. An upgrade.”

“You killed them,” Will says, his voice shaking. “You killed my dad and my sister.”

“Killed?” Chrystal makes a tsking sound, a soft click of her tongue against her teeth. “Oh, no, William. That’s such a dramatic, messy word. I didn’t kill them. I archived them. The originals are… stored. Safely. Think of it as putting away your winter clothes for the summer. These versions are just better. More agreeable. More harmonious. They don’t yell, or get sick, or make mistakes.”

Her eyes drift to the empty mold of him. “Most of them, anyway. Your father’s model seems to have a recurring glitch in the emotional processing unit. Your little outburst at dinner caused a system crash. We’ll have to run diagnostics.” She says it with the mild annoyance of someone discussing a faulty toaster.

“You’re insane,” he says.

“Am I?” Her smile widens. It’s a genuinely amused, almost charming smile, and that makes it a thousand times more horrifying. “Or am I just a pragmatist? Look at the world, Will. It’s chaotic. It’s flawed. I’m merely creating a small pocket of order. A perfect, happy family. Isn’t that what everyone wants?”

“Not like this,” Will says, taking another step back. His back hits the workbench. He fumbles behind him, his hand closing around something cold and metallic. A wrench. It feels heavy, real. Solid.

Chrystal’s eyes follow the movement. The amusement in her face fades slightly, replaced by a flicker of… disappointment.

“Oh, William,” she sighs. “There you go again. Reaching for a crude, inefficient solution. Violence? It’s the messiest variable of all. I was hoping you’d be different. I was hoping you’d see the beauty in it. The logic.”

She takes another step closer. He can see the tiny, perfect snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. They don’t melt.

“Your sister, Anna, she understood immediately. The transition was seamless. She saw the appeal of a life without angst, without doubt. Your father was a bit more resistant, but he came around. He saw the benefits of a stable, predictable existence.”

“You’re a monster,” he says, his knuckles white around the wrench.

“I’m a mother,” she corrects him gently. “And a mother’s love is about wanting what’s best for her children. I just have a more direct method of achieving it. I’ve left your… template… open for a reason.” Her gaze is intense, hypnotic. “That question mark on the checklist? That’s you, Will. You are the final variable. You can choose to be a part of this. You can join our perfect little family. No more confusion. No more pain. Just… pleasantness. Forever. Or, you can continue to be a glitch.”

She stops, standing just out of his reach. The shed is silent now, the wind outside seeming to hold its breath.

“And we both know what happens to glitches, don’t we?” she asks softly. “They get deleted.”

The threat hangs in the frozen air between them, more chilling than any physical weapon. He has a choice. Integration or erasure. Perfection or nothingness. He looks from her unnervingly calm face to the hollow mold of himself, a blank slate waiting for an imprint. He thinks of his real dad’s terrible jokes, his sister’s fiery rage, the beautiful, messy, imperfect chaos of what they once were. He grips the wrench tighter.

Chrystal sees his decision in his eyes. Her own expression hardens into something ancient and cold. The mask of the perfect stepmother falls away completely, revealing the sculptor beneath. The artist. The engineer of souls.

“I see,” she says, her voice flat and devoid of all warmth. “A pity. I had designed such a wonderful personality matrix for you. Witty, but not disruptive. Intelligent, but compliant.”

She raises a hand, not to strike, but simply points a finger at him. The air around her seems to crackle, the temperature in the shed dropping another ten degrees in an instant. Frost begins to creep across the floor from her feet, tracing intricate, feathery patterns toward him.

“Don’t worry, William,” she says, her smile returning, but this time it’s all ice and edges. “I’m a perfectionist. I never throw away good material. We’ll just have to do this the hard way.”

She takes a final, fluid step forward, and the beam from his phone flickers and dies, plunging the world into absolute blackness. All he can hear is the soft, crunching sound of her footsteps on the spreading frost, and the impossibly gentle, impossibly terrifying sound of her voice.

“Here, dear,” she says, her voice right next to his ear, as if from nowhere. “You look chilled to the bone. Let me fix you a nice, warm mug of hot cocoa.”

From the outside, through the frosted glass of the living room window, the scene is perfect. The blizzard has finally subsided, leaving the world hushed and white under a full moon. Inside, a fire crackles merrily in the hearth, casting a warm, flickering glow on the family gathered before it. Dad sits in his favourite armchair, a book open on his lap, a placid smile on his face. Anna is curled on the rug, sketching in a notepad, her expression one of serene concentration. Chrystal sits on the sofa, her hands resting gracefully in her lap, watching her perfect family with a look of deep, maternal satisfaction. And beside her, nestled into the cushions, is Will. He is smiling, too. A wide, pleasant, perfect smile that does not waver. In his hands, he cradles a mug of hot cocoa. A single, perfect marshmallow floats on its surface. The cocoa is untouched. It has been for a very long time. And outside, a single set of footprints, clumsy and panicked, leads from the house to the shed, and no footprints lead back.