I reached to take the album, but Fiona’s hand came out to stop me. “Can I just—for a second … ?”

I moved back and left her to it. She pulled the album closer, circled it with her forearms. The room was still; I could hear the faint hiss of the central heating moving through the walls.

“That summer,” Fiona said, barely to us. Her head was bent over the photo, hair tumbling. “We laughed so much. The ice cream … There was this little ice-cream kiosk, down near the beach—our parents used to go there when they were kids. That summer the landlord said he was raising the rent to something astronomical, there was no way the guy could pay it—the landlord wanted to force him out, so he could sell the land for, I don’t know, offices or apartments or something. Everyone around was outraged—the place was like an institution, you know? Kids got their first ice cream there, you went on first dates there … Pat and Conor, they said, ‘There’s only one way to keep him in business: we’ll see how much ice cream we can get into us.’ We ate ice cream every single day, that summer. It was like a mission. We’d only be finished one lot, and Pat and Conor would disappear and they’d come back with another big handful of cones, and we’d all be screaming at them to get those away from us; they’d be cracking up laughing, telling us, ‘Go on, you have to do it, it’s for the cause, rage against the machine …’ Jenny kept saying she was going to turn into a great big lump of lard and then Pat would be sorry, but she ate them anyway. We all did.”

Her fingertip brushed across the photo, lingering on Pat’s shoulder, Jenny’s hair, coming to rest on Conor’s T-shirt. She said, on a sad whisper of a laugh, “‘I go to JoJo’s.’”

For a second Richie and I didn’t breathe. Then Richie said, easily, “JoJo’s was the ice-cream shop, yeah?”

“Yeah. He gave out these little badges, that summer, so you could show you supported him. ‘I go to JoJo’s,’ and a picture of an ice cream cone. Half of Monkstown was wearing them—old women and everything. We saw a priest with one once.” Her finger shifted, moving off a pale spot on Conor’s T-shirt. It was small and blurry enough that we hadn’t looked at it twice. Each bright T-shirt and top had one somewhere, the chest, the collar, the sleeve.

I bent to fish in the cardboard box, pulled out the little evidence bag that held the rusted pin we had found hidden in Jenny’s drawer. I passed it across the table. “Is this one of the badges?”

Fiona said softly, “Oh my God. God, look at that …” She tilted the badge to the light, searching for the image through the wear and the print dust that had turned up nothing. “Yeah, it is. Is this Pat’s or Jenny’s?”