She only had a teenage picture of Laura, because her sister had been killed when she was just eighteen. They hadn’t been particularly close, but sometimes she found herself looking at Laura’s face and wondering what she would have been like as an adult. It wasn’t that Cindy felt alone. Not really. She had Jonny, she had tons of friends. Even so, she wished that her relationship with Laura had been stronger when they were kids.

Her morning was busy with physio appointments. She worked with a seventy-two-year-old woman recovering from a hip replacement. She taught exercises to a thirty-something man dealing with a pinched nerve in his neck. A sixteen-year-old girl who’d broken her ankle playing soccer came in for work on the weight machines and got an extended lecture from Cindy about safe sex.

At lunchtime, she wandered around the corner of 3rd Street to St. Anne’s to eat in the cafeteria, but when she spotted the cardiac wing on the hospital sign, she took an impulsive detour and headed for Janine Snow’s office. She hadn’t seen her friend since the night of the murder.

Cindy asked the receptionist to get a message to Janine, and she sat down to wait. It was a typical doctor’s office. Old magazines. Soothing paintings on the wall. Children’s books and toys. The only other people in the waiting room were a black woman and her son. The boy was around ten, and he had his face pushed against an aquarium, making nose prints as he watched the brightly colored tropical fish.

‘Sherman,’ the woman called to her son. She was probably in her late twenties but had the tired posture and foghorn cough of an older woman. When he didn’t answer, she spoke more sharply: ‘Sherman, you look at me right now.’

The boy turned away from the aquarium and folded his arms across his chest. ‘What?’

‘See if this nice woman here would like a cup of coffee.’

Cindy smiled. ‘Oh, I’m fine, thank you.’

‘No, it’s the polite thing to do,’ the woman said. ‘He has to be polite. Sherman Aloysious, what did I say?’

With an exaggerated sigh, the boy wandered to a coffee urn on a corner table and filled a Styrofoam cup. The woman winked at Cindy. ‘We named him after his grandfathers, but truth to tell, he’s not so fond of either name.’

Sherman Aloysious brought Cindy a cup of coffee, and she thanked him profusely. He was at that little-boy stage where his ears had grown faster than the rest of his head, and his skinny arms and long legs looked out of proportion. Even so, he was cute. She won him over enough to get a shy smile, and he returned to his previous job of studying the fish.