Right up until something changed, and they hadn’t been close any more. “Was he a good godfather?”

“Yeah. He was great.” Fiona smiled, down at the gangly boy in the photo. The thought of telling her made me wince. “We used to bring the kids to the zoo together, him and me, and he’d tell Emma stories about the animals having mad adventures after the zoo got locked up for the night … One time she lost her teddy, the one she had in bed at night? She was devastated. Conor told her the teddy had won a round-the-world trip, and he got all these postcards of places like Surinam and Mauritius and Alaska, I don’t even know where he got them—I guess online—and he cut out photos of a teddy like hers and stuck them on the cards, and wrote messages from the teddy, like, ‘Today I went skiing on this mountain and then drank hot chocolate, I’m sending you a big hug, love, Benjy,’ and he’d post them to Emma. Every single day, till she got all into this new doll and she wasn’t upset about the bear any more, she got one of those cards.”

“When was that?”

“Like three years ago? Jack was only a baby, so …”

That ripple of pain darted across Fiona’s face again. Before she could start thinking, I asked, “When was the last time you saw Conor?”

There was a sudden wary flicker in her eyes. The safe shell of concentration was starting to thin; she knew something was up, even if she couldn’t tell what. She sat back in her chair and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I’m not sure. It’s been a while. A couple of years, I guess.”

“He wasn’t at Emma’s birthday party, this April?”

The tension in her shoulders went up a notch. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I guess he couldn’t make it.”

I said, “You’ve just told us Conor was willing to go to a lot of trouble for his goddaughter. Why wouldn’t he bother with her birthday party?”

Fiona shrugged. “Ask him. I don’t know.”

She was picking at the sleeve of her jumper again and not looking at either of us. I leaned back, got comfortable and waited.

It took a few minutes. Fiona glanced at her watch and ripped at fragments of fluff, until she realized that we could wait longer than she could. Finally she said, “I think they could have maybe had some kind of argument.”

I nodded. “An argument about what?”

An uncomfortable shrug. “When Jenny and Pat bought the house, Conor thought they were nuts. I did too, but they didn’t want to hear that, so I tried a couple of times and then I kept my mouth shut. I mean, even if I wasn’t sure it would work out, they were happy, so I wanted to be happy for them.”

“But Conor didn’t. Why not?”

“He’s not great at keeping his mouth shut and just nodding and smiling, even when that’s the best thing he could do. He thinks it’s hypocritical. If he thinks something’s a crap idea, he’ll say it’s a crap idea.”