My Late Sister

Fred Blackwood is the villain of a story already written: a high-school senior with an eating disorder, orphaned after his parents died in a car crash, destined to waste away alone in the family mansion once the heroine Stella tires of him. But the sickly little sister he was meant to lose, Willow, wakes in her hospital bed instead, and the floating comments that follow her every move are baffled. She is alive, and Fred treats her as his whole world.

Back home, the household discovers that Willow refuses every spoonful of creamed chicken porridge, even though Mr. Evans and Mrs. Gable find nothing wrong with it. Only when Fred forces down bites of his own cooking, fighting his own revulsion, does she finally swallow. The butler realises she is copying her brother, learning to eat from him.

So the question hangs over the mansion: is a two-year-old truly teaching the story's doomed villain to feed himself, or is she playing them all?