Her voice was getting higher and faster, with a brittle edge on it. Mr. Daly put out a hand and clasped it around hers for a moment, and she bit down on her lips. Kevin looked like he was trying to ooze down between the sofa cushions and disappear.

Nora said, quietly, “No. Not a word. At first we just thought . . .” She glanced fast at her father: she’d thought Rosie was taking it for granted that she was cut off, for running away with me. “Even once we heard you weren’t with her. We always thought she was in England.” Mrs. Daly tipped her head back and swiped off a tear.

So that was that: no quick out, no waving bye-bye to my family and erasing yesterday evening from my mind and going back to my personal approximation of normal, and no chance of getting Nora langered and coaxing Rosie’s phone number out of her. Mr. Daly said heavily, without looking at any of us, “We’ll have to ring the Guards.”

I almost hid a dubious look. “Right. You could, yeah. That was my family’s first instinct, too, but I thought you should be the ones to decide if you really want to go that way.”

He gave me a suspicious stare. “Why wouldn’t we?”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “Look,” I said. “I’d love to tell you the cops will give this the attention it deserves, but I can’t. Ideally I’d like to see this tested for fingerprints and for blood, just for starters”—Mrs. Daly made a terrible squeaking sound, into her hands—“but before that can happen, it would need to be given a case number, the case would need to be assigned to a detective, and the detective would need to submit a request for testing. I can tell you right now, it’s not going to happen. No one’s going to throw valuable resources at something that might not even be a crime to begin with. Missing Persons and Cold Cases and the General Unit will bounce this back and forth between them for a few months, until they get bored, give up and file it in a basement somewhere. You need to be prepared for that.”

Nora asked, “But what about you? Could you not put in the request?”

I shook my head ruefully. “Not officially, no. No matter how far you stretch it, this definitely isn’t something my squad would deal with. Once it goes into the system, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But,” Nora said. She was sitting up straighter, alert, watching me. “If it wasn’t in the system, like; if it was just you. Could you . . . is there not a way to . . . ?”