Vee was standing in her sister’s window. She looked bleached out, drained of blood.

You okay? I mouthed. Vee blinked hard and looked away. When she lifted her head to face me again, she nodded.

“Mr. Curtis?”

I turned. The detective in the dirty suit. His smile was friendly, though there was something behind the eyes that was not. He held out his hand. “May I have your cell phone?”

Licia’s bed was made. The blind was closed, the air stale and lifeless.

I walked to the window and wound the handle. Outside, metal slats jerked open. Light flooded in. Everything was neat, with none of the easy disorder of Vee’s bedroom. The plain blue carpet and the clean white walls and the cheap IKEA bedframe, none of which we owned. Licia had never made the room her own.

I sat down on her bed. My little girl, I would say, and she would sigh, and roll her eyes, and make her voice deep. “Don’t tell me I’m little. Who wants to be little?” Still, she would lean in to me briefly, before thinking better of it, pushing me laughingly away. The closest she ever got to rebellion.

I lay my head on the pillow, smelled the washing powder and the soap and the patchouli scent that made up Licia’s smell.

My little girl, I thought. Fifteen and gone. But my other daughter’s voice pulled me back.

“Dad!”

“Coming, Vee!”

There was Vee in the living room, balled into the rented blue sofa, a bag of cheap yellow candies on the table in front of her, flicking through the channels on the rented TV. On every channel a new opinion over the same images, over and over and over. The bomb, the obliterated town hall, the ash raining down through the burnt air. Hard to know what you were looking at; everything gray and indistinct.

Above the sofa a two-meter square of deep red-brown. Another of Elsa’s photographs, Carmine 34. The only object in the room that we actually owned.

From the kitchen I could hear Elsa’s bare feet scuffing about.

“Vee,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

“Not hungry. Thanks, though.” Looking at me all the while.

“What you got in that bag?”

“Scum bananas. They’re actually pretty good.” Still staring at me. “Are you really not going to get that?”

“Get what?”

The doorbell chimed.

Vee turned toward the hall. “You didn’t hear it the first time?”

“Did it ring before?”

Vee nodded.

I walked through the dark interior of the apartment to the hall, looked at the screen on the intercom. Edvard, staring awkwardly down at the camera.