I played some solitaire and told my stomach it wasn’t hungry. I considered raiding Simone’s fridge but figured she might have booby-trapped it; I’d grab the mustard and trip a wire, take an arrow in the head.

Dawn came in a faded line of pale gold that pushed up the black cover of night, then an alarm clock went off in the next room, and soon I heard the shower running. I stretched until I heard the satisfactory crack of bones and muscles, then did my morning regimen of fifty sit-ups and fifty push-ups. By the time I’d finished, the second turn in the shower had been taken, and the two sisters were standing by the door, ready to go.

Simone said, “You take anything from my fridge?”

“No,” I said, “but I think I may have mistaken it for the toilet last night. I was really tired. Do you keep vegetables in the toilet?”

She brushed past me into the kitchen. Jenna looked at me and shook her head. She said, “Bet you were real popular in the second grade.”

“Good humor has no age limit,” I said, and she rolled her eyes.

Simone had a job, and I’d debated all night whether I should let her go to it. In the end I figured Simone hadn’t shown any homicidal tendencies toward her sister that I’d noticed, so I was pretty sure she’d keep her mouth shut.

As we stood on the porch watching her drive off, I said, “Does this Socia guy know about Simone?”

Jenna was working her way into a light cardigan even though the temperature was already on a steady cruise toward the seventies at eight in the morning. She said, “He met her. Long time ago. In Alabama.”

“How long since she moved up north?”

She shrugged. “Two months.”

“And Socia definitely doesn’t know she’s here?”

She looked at me like I was drugged. “We both be dead now, Socia knew that.”

We walked to my car and Jenna looked at it as I opened the door. “Never grew up totally, did you, Kenzie?”

And I’d once thought the car would impress people.

***

The drive back was as boring as the one up. I had Pearl Jam’s Ten playing, and if Jenna minded, she didn’t say anything. She didn’t talk much, period, just stared out at the road and kneaded the bottom of her cardigan with her thin fingers when they weren’t occupied with a cigarette.

As we neared the city, the Hancock and Prudential buildings rising up in pale blue to greet us, she said, “Kenzie.”

“Yeah.”

“You ever feel needed?”

I thought about it. “Sometimes,” I said.

“Who by?”

“My partner. Angie.”

“You need her?”

I nodded. “Sometimes, yeah. Hell, yeah.”

She looked out the window. “You best hold on to her then.”

***

Rush hour was in full swing by the time we got off 93 near Haymarket, and it took us close to half an hour to move the mile up onto Tremont Street.