She made a noise low in her throat. It was the one she made when she conducted preliminary interviews for our podcast, and didn’t believe the answers she was being fed.

Of course Sophie had many ways of getting to the truth. Now she pulled out guilt, a tool she manipulated with the precision of a top chef’s boning knife. “It’s not every week we get nominated for an award.”

“Which is another reason you should be outside keeping energy high. That’s a naturally suspicious bunch. Pretty soon they’re going to come looking.”

She gave up, something she never does on phone calls, and after she removed my clock from the wall and reset the time, she left me to wait alone.

The party, originally planned as a casual passing of cheap champagne around my living room, had morphed into a barbecue. This was all good. Something a bit more raucous was fitting for the year’s final meeting of the talented crew that had created the first season of Out in the Cold.

Our podcast’s stated mission was to take one cold case per season, warm it up again and bring it to the attention of the authorities. Apparently we hadn’t done badly, which is why the meeting had turned into a celebration. Three days ago we had been nominated for a Webby for best documentary.

As if to remind me what I was missing, I heard shouts in the common area I shared with two other units. Before I came inside, the sound designer and recording engineer, as well as two editors and a fact-checker, had been grilling miscellaneous cuts of meat. The composer of our theme music, along with two production assistants, had been laying out salads and desserts. Several cops, a lawyer, and our personal technology wonk, had promised to stop in later. They had advised us during the countless hours when we’d been so depressed about the show’s prospects that we had secretly honed our résumés.

I was itching to join everyone, but I was worried. Our father, Dale Gracey, who’d had bypass surgery six days ago, was due to come home from the hospital that afternoon. While I lived on the east side of the state, Wendy was staying on the west, just a few miles from our parents while her submarine commander husband was submerged—God knows where. It was possible she’d heard something I hadn’t.

Wendy always gets the news first. When you grow up in the shadow of a much older sister, you learn not to protest. The flaws of an older child are bleached by time, while a younger’s are always in plain view. When the older child is Wendy, who is good at nearly everything, the right daughter to help during a family crisis is obvious. I am either protected or overlooked. That’s how we roll.

The one place where I beat Wendy hands down was the written word. Although she’s now forty-five, judging from the text, my sister still couldn’t spell. Of course it was possible abbreviations and misspellings were one and the same. But how would I know? Wendy started college the year I was born. By the time I was in kindergarten, she was learning to be the perfect navy wife. Wendy turned into a larger-than-life role model who popped in now and then to tell me how big I’d gotten, while proving, by her very existence, that I could never catch up.