Free Broken Harbor by Tana French

day, you know?”
    “It sounds nice. How was she yesterday?”
    “
Normal
! She was completely
normal
! There was nothing, I swear to God, I’ve gone over it in my head and there was
nothing
—”
    “I’m sure there wasn’t,” I said soothingly. “What did you talk about?”
    “Just stuff, I don’t know. One of my flatmates plays bass, her band has a gig coming up, I told Jenny about that; she was telling me how she was looking online for a toy stegosaurus, because Jack had brought home some friend from preschool on Friday and they went hunting a stegosaurus in the garden . . . She sounded
fine
. Totally
fine
.”
    “Would she have told you if there was anything wrong?”
    “Yeah, I think so. She would. I’m sure she would.”
    Which didn’t sound sure. I asked, “Are you two close?”
    Fiona said, “There’s just the two of us.” She heard herself and realized that wasn’t an answer. “Yeah. We’re close. I mean, we were closer when we were younger, teenagers—we sort of went in different directions after that. And it’s not as easy now that Jenny’s out here.”
    “How long has that been?”
    “They bought the house like three years ago.” 2006: the height of the boom. Whatever they had paid, these days the gaff was worth half of that. “There was nothing here then, though, just fields; they bought off the plans. I thought they were mental, but Jenny was over the moon, she was so
excited
—their own place . . .” Fiona’s mouth contorted, but she got it back together. “They moved out here maybe a year later. As soon as the house was finished.”
    I asked, “And what about you? Where do you live?”
    “In Dublin. Ranelagh.”
    “You said you share a flat?”
    “Yeah. Me and two other girls.”
    “What do you do?”
    “I’m a photographer. I’m trying to get an exhibition together, but meanwhile I work at Studio Pierre—you know, Pierre, he was on that TV show about elite Irish weddings? I mostly do the baby shoots, or if Keith—Pierre—gets two weddings on the same day, I do one of them.”
    “Were you doing a baby shoot this morning?”
    She had to work to remember, it was so far away. “No. I was going through shots, these shots from last week—the mother’s coming in today to pick the album.”
    “What time did you leave?”
    “Like quarter past nine. One of the guys said he’d sort out the album for me.”
    “Where’s Studio Pierre?”
    “By Phoenix Park.”
    An hour from Broken Harbor, minimum, in morning traffic and in that shitty little car. I asked, “Had you been worried about Jenny?”
    That electric-shock head-shake.
    “Are you sure? That’s an awful lot of hassle to go to because someone doesn’t answer her phone.”
    A tense shrug. Fiona balanced the foam cup carefully beside her, tapped ash. “I wanted to make sure she was OK.”
    “Why wouldn’t she have been?”
    “
Because.
We always talk. Every day, for years. And I was right, wasn’t I? She wasn’t OK.”
    Her chin wobbled. I leaned in close to give her a tissue, didn’t lean back. “Ms. Rafferty,” I said. “We both know there was more to it than that. You don’t ditch work, possibly annoy a client, and drive for an hour, just because your sister’s out of touch for forty-five minutes. You could have assumed that she’d gone to bed with a migraine, or that she’d lost her phone, or that the kids had come down with the flu, or any one of several hundred things, all of them a lot more likely than this. Instead, you jumped straight to the conclusion that something was wrong. You need to tell me why.”
    Fiona bit down on her bottom lip. The air stank of cigarette smoke and singed wool—she had dropped hot ash on her coat, somewhere in there—and there was a dank, bitter smell coming off her, spreading on her breath and seeping out of her pores. Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
    “It