The officer turned and looked at Jake for the first time. “Did you see Gina when she came here to the house?” he asked.

“Oh, no. That was long after my bedtime.” He said it with a kind of faux heartiness that Alice had never heard before. He sounds like he’s lying, she thought.

But Officer Wilson didn’t follow up. He turned back to Alice. “Did you think it was unusual that Gina wanted to go swimming?” he asked.

“Um . . . I guess so. It was late at night.”

“Besides it being late at night, did it surprise you in other ways? Is this something she liked to do?”

“Swimming?”

“Yes.”

“I guess so. I don’t really know.”

The officer was writing something. When he didn’t immediately ask another question, Alice said, “We’d gone swimming before, Gina and I. The last time that we spent together. It was nice. I think she wanted to repeat the experience as a way to . . . to get back that feeling. She said that swimming together would be like a fresh start.”

“She said that here, the night she came over.”

“Something like that.”

“Why did you need a fresh start?”

“Just like I said, we’d been close before, and now we weren’t so close. We’d drifted apart.”

“Okay.” The officer nodded fractionally and was quiet again for a moment. Alice didn’t say anything, either, this time.

“One more thing,” he said. “Had Gina ever said anything to you that made you think she might be suicidal?”

“No. Like I said, I barely even—”

“Not just recently, Alice, but when you knew her in high school. Or anytime really.”

“Oh.” Alice pretended to think. “There was this one time, our senior year, when we were talking about our futures, you know. Where we might be in a few years. And she said something like: ‘Alice, you’ll still be here in Kennewick. You’ll probably be married to some perfect man, and have a baby boy and a baby girl, and I’ll still be in New York, and I’ll be a rich model with a major drug habit, and about sixteen boyfriends, and I’ll be so unhappy that I’ll probably kill myself.’ I mean, I didn’t think anything of it at the time.”

“When did she say this?”

“Our senior year. I thought she was just joking.”

“You’ve been really helpful, Alice,” the officer said as he stood. Jake stood as well and walked him to the door. Alice stayed seated, but the officer turned back and thanked her before he left the condo. She felt a sudden emptiness, like she hadn’t been ready for him to leave, that there was more she could have said.

“What do you think that was all about?” Jake asked after shutting the door and turning back into the living room.

“What do you mean?”