Since she’d made it out of her house about two hours before rush hour, the expressway out to the airport had been practically empty. Denver International Airport, with its peaked white canvas roof, was a beautiful mini range of snowcapped mountains sprouting up in the middle of the Colorado plains, still mostly surrounded by nothing but grass. Only a few hotels and restaurants had staked claims. Suburban homes and neighborhoods were beginning to creep closer every year; and once the enormous convention center was completed, Eileen imagined this once-remote architectural wonder would eventually get dwarfed and hemmed in.

She parked Eric’s car out in the economy lot, rode the shuttle bus with her suitcase and tote into the terminal, collected her boarding pass at the automated kiosks, and blew past security with no more trouble than an extra look at her camera and the one extra lens she’d packed safe into the center of her case. By the time she was on the concourse checking the departure board, she had an hour to wait before her flight boarded.

It occurred to her that she was both hungry and thirsty. She’d been in such a storm of activity all day that food had never even occurred to her. She turned away from the departure board, set on investigating the restaurants in the B concourse, and came face-to-face with her sister.

The Tattered Cover, one of Denver’s independent bookstores, had a small airport shop. She stood staring into it. Other passengers browsed the shelves. One man and his son were purchasing something at the counter, and two women stood at the center display table picking up copies of Clare’s newest book, A Perfect Life.

Eileen watched the two women as they noted their common interest. She couldn’t hear them, but the woman in yoga pants and a sweatshirt said something to the woman wearing the gray pantsuit. They both furrowed their brows, shook their heads, then took their copies of Clare’s book to the register.

The news about Clare’s death was out.

Eileen pulled her suitcase to the display table and stared down at the stacks and stacks of hardcovers with her sister’s name. In true sibling rivalry fashion, it had been years since she had either purchased or read one of her sister’s books. At the beginning of Clare’s career, it had been easy to support her. A struggling writer, no different from the millions of other struggling artists, Clare had lived in a run-down one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with three other starving artists, subsisting on canned soup and apples. Back then, confident in her choice to put her camera down and pursue accounting as a major, Eileen had enthusiastically read every story draft her sister sent her. Most of them had been mediocre at best, and not a single one of them was ever accepted for publication.

Until one day, one was.