Sister

that it was a little distended, maybe five months pregnant. She brusquely wiped her tears away. “This probably isn’t what you want to hear, but Emilio was working from home last Thursday; he usually does that one day a week. I was with him all day and then we went to a drinks party. Emilio’s weak, with no moral fiber to speak of, but he wouldn’t hurt anyone. Physically, at least.”

She turned to go, but I had a bomb to drop on her life first.

“Tess’s baby had cystic fibrosis. It means Emilio must be a carrier.”

I might as well have punched her. “But our little girl—she’s fine.”

You and I have grown up with genetics, as other children grow up knowing about their dad’s football team. This wasn’t a great time for a crash course, but I tried.

“The CF gene is recessive. That means that even if you and Emilio both carry it, you both also carry a healthy gene. So your baby would have a twenty-five-percent chance of having CF.”

“And if I’m not a carrier of the CF gene?”

“Then there’s no way your baby can have it. Both parents have to carry it.”

She nodded, still reeling.

“It’s probably best to get checked out.”

“Yes.”

I wanted to steady the shakiness in her voice. “Even in the worst-case scenario, there’s a new therapy now.”

I felt her warmth in the snowy garden. “You’re very generous to be concerned.”

Emilio came out onto the doorstep and called her name. She didn’t move or acknowledge him in any way, looking intently at me. “I hope they find the person who killed your sister.”

She turned and walked slowly back to the house, triggering the security light. In its glare I could see Emilio putting an arm around her, but she shrugged him off, hugging her arms tightly around herself. He caught sight of me watching, then turned away.

I waited in the wintry darkness till the lights in the house were switched off.

6

As I drove back to your flat along precariously icy roads, Todd phoned to say he was getting a flight to Heathrow, landing in the morning, and the thought of him made the road feel a little more secure somehow.

The next morning, standing at the arrivals barrier, I didn’t recognize him when he walked through, my eyes still scanning for someone else—an idealized Todd? You? When I did see him, he seemed slighter than I remembered him, a little smaller. The first thing I asked was whether a letter from you had arrived, but there was nothing.

He had brought a case of clothes for me with everything he thought I’d need, including an appropriate outfit for your funeral and a prescription of sleeping pills from my U.S. doctor. That first morning, and from then on, he made sure I ate properly. The description of him, of us, feels a little disconnected, I know, but that’s how it felt.

He was my safety rope. But he wasn’t—yet—breaking my fall.

I have left out Todd’s arrival but have told Mr. Wright about my confrontation on Emilio’s doorstep and my time in the garden with his wife.

“I knew Emilio had a motive for killing Tess—losing his job and possibly his marriage. Now I also knew that he was capable of living with a lie. And of twisting the truth into the shape he wanted. Even in front of me, her sister, he had claimed Xavier was no more than the fantasy of an obsessed student.”

“And Mrs. Codi, did you believe her alibi for him?”

“At the time, I did. I liked her. But later, I thought she might have chosen to lie for him to protect her little girl and unborn baby. I thought that her children came first with her, and for their sake she wouldn’t want him in prison; and that her little girl was the reason she hadn’t left Emilio when she’d discovered he’d been unfaithful.”

Mr. Wright looks down at a file in front of him. “You didn’t tell the police about this encounter?”

The file must be the police log of my calls.

“No. Two days later, DS Finborough told me that Emilio Codi had made a formal complaint about me to his boss, Detective Inspector Haines.”

“What did you think his reason was?” asks Mr. Wright.

“I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think about it at the time because in that same phone call DS Finborough said that they’d got the postmortem results back. I was surprised they’d done it so quickly but he told me that they always try to, so that the family can have a funeral.”

I’m sorry that your body had to be cut again. The coroner requested it and we had no say in it. But I don’t think you mind. You’ve always been a pragmatist about death, having no sentiment for the body left behind. When Leo died, Mum and I hugged his dead body to us, cheating ourselves with the illusion that we were still hugging Leo. At just six years old you walked away. I pitied you for your courage.

I, on the other hand, have always been reverential. When we found Thumbelina dead in her hutch, you prodded her with slender five-year-old fingers to discover what death felt like, even as you wept, while I wrapped her in a silk scarf, believing with all the solemnity of a ten-year-old that a dead body is precious. I can hear you laughing at me for talking about a rabbit—the point is I’ve always thought a body is more than a vessel for the soul.

But the night you were found, I had a powerful sense of you leaving your body and vortexlike sucking up all that you are with you. You were trailing clouds of glory in the opposite direction. Maybe the image was prompted by your Chagall print in the kitchen, those ethereal people rising heavenward, but whatever caused it, I knew that your body no longer held any part of you.