She said, “OK. I’ll try.”

She would tell us things she had never wanted to mention, to give herself a reason to keep talking. “We appreciate that,” I said. “I know it’s difficult, but you’re doing the right thing.”

Fiona balanced her tea on her thin knees, cupping it between her hands, and gave me her full attention. Already her spine had uncurled a notch. I said, “Let’s start at the beginning. There’s a good chance none of this will be relevant, but it’s important for us to get all the information we can. You said Pat and Jenny got together when they were sixteen, isn’t that right? Can you tell me how they met?”

“Not exactly. We’re all from the same area, so we knew each other from around, ever since we were little kids, like in primary school; I don’t remember the exact first time any of us met. When we got to like twelve or thirteen, a bunch of us started hanging out together—just messing about on the beach, or Rollerblading, or we’d go down to Dun Laoghaire and hang out on the pier. Sometimes we went into town, for the cinema and then Burger King, or on the weekends we’d go to the school discos if there was a good one on. Just kid stuff, but we were close. Really close.”

Richie said, “There’s no one like the mates you make when you’re a teenager. How many in the gang?”

“Jenny and me. Pat and his brother Ian. Shona Williams. Conor Brennan. Ross McKenna—Mac. There were a couple of others who hung out with us sometimes, but that was the real gang.”

I rummaged in my cardboard box, found a photo album—pink cover, flowers made of sequins—and flipped it open at a Post-it. Seven teenagers perched on a wall, squashed together to fit in the shot, laughter and brandished ice cream cones and bright T-shirts. Fiona had braces, Jenny’s hair was a shade darker; Pat had his arms wrapped around her—his shoulders were already as broad as a man’s, but his face was a boy’s, open and ruddy—and she was taking a huge mock-bite out of his ice cream. Conor was all gangly legs and arms, doing a goofy chimpanzee impression, falling off the wall. I said, “Is this the gang?”

Fiona put her tea down on the table—too quickly; a few drops slopped out—and reached out a hand to the album. She said, “That’s Jenny’s.”

“I know,” I said gently. “We needed to borrow it, just for a while.”

It made her shoulders jump, the sudden feel of our fingers probing deep into their lives. “God,” she said, involuntarily.

“We’ll have it back to Jenny as soon as possible.”

“Can you … If you get done with it in time, maybe could you just not tell her you had it? She doesn’t need anything else to deal with. This …” Fiona spread her hand across the photo. She said, so quietly I barely heard her, “We were really happy.”