The air was thick with humidity. The towels were visibly damp, some of them clinging darkly to one another where they’d soaked up water. The carpet underneath the fort squelched slightly when she shifted her weight.
And the bed?—
She stepped closer.
The whole mattress was one big, sagging, damp patch. Someone had clearly decided that if they were going to have an authentic snow cave, they needed actual water involved.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “We’re going to go step by step here. One: where did the water come from?”
Frank looked pleased with himself. “We made indoor snow.”
“How?” Erin asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“We put the cold tap on,” Matilda said. “And then we got the biggest jug and we poured the water onto the towels, so they’d be like snow. And then Hyzzie said we needed ‘air flow’ so we borrowed the heater.”
Erin followed the extension cord with her eyes, watching it snake from the socket near the dresser, across the floor, and under the edge of the fort.
“Please tell me,” she said, “that you did not pour water directly onto the heater.”
“We’re not stupid,” Hyz said mildly. “We know about electricity.”
“That’s why the heater is over here,” Florence said,pointing to where the fan wheezed determinedly into the towel cave. “It’s blowing the snow.”
“That is… not how snow works,” Erin said. “That’s how saunas work. Extremely flammable saunas.”
She crossed the room in three strides and switched the heater off, ignoring the chorus of protests.
“Traitor,” Frank said. “We were acclimatising.”
“You were marinating,” Erin said. “There’s a difference.”
She tugged the plug out of the wall for good measure, winding the cord up in quick, efficient motions. This was what her life had become: disarming improvised heat traps built by five-year-olds.
“Mummy Erin,” Matilda said, as if delivering the coup de grâce. “You’re dripping.”
“I’m what?” Erin looked down.
Sure enough, there were darker patches on the front of her jumper where damp towels had sagged against her when she’d lunged for the heater. A trickle of cold water had found its way down the inside of her collar.
“I am,” she said flatly. “Great. Excellent. This is exactly the look I was going for.”
From the corridor outside, there was the faint murmur of staff voices. Somewhere in the distance, a door slammed, followed by the muffled thud of something heavy being dragged. The castle was adjusting to the power flicker, to the snow, to all the small cracks that weather always exposed.
Erin looked at the bed again.
A dark, irregular stain spread from the centre of the mattress, blooming outward like some sort of depressing modern art. The duvet sagged, the filling bunched. When she pressed down experimentally with one knuckle, water welled up.
Her brain did a quick, ruthless calculation.
Mattress: soaked. Duvet: soaked. Pillows under fort: damp. Spare linens: presumably involved in this fiasco. Drying time: days, at least, in this humidity and cold.
Her last remaining fantasy of bringing Alex up here to a warm, soft bed, collapsing together in a heap, evaporated like… well. Vaporised snow.
“Okay,” she said again, because if she didn’t keep talking, she might scream. “Let’s regroup. Operation Snow Cave is now officially over.”
Four small faces stared at her, varying degrees of dismay and defiance painted across them.
“It’s not over,” Frank said. “We still have to test the igloo’s structural integrity.”
