I told Jesse what had happened at Kaylee Quan’s house, all of it. How Tariq had restrained her, how I’d joined in the interrogation, how Tariq had told her at the end to lie there for half an hour after we left, and that if she called the police she would die and so would her parents in Hong Kong. He’d recited her parents’ address and she had cried and pleaded with him not to hurt them. Admitting aloud what I’d done made me feel sick and ashamed, and I had to admit it had brought me no closer to finding Claudia. My sister remained as elusive as a puff of smoke. Was she doing this deliberately to punish me? What had Ridley told her?

“Nobody knows Claudia better than you,” Jesse said, after I’d pulled myself together. “What does your gut say?”

I pulled the blanket around me more tightly and stared at the television. We were watching The Barefoot Contessa for the thousandth time, and we’d left the sound off. By now, we knew Ava Gardner’s and Humphrey Bogart’s lines so well we didn’t have to hear them. “My sister hates me.”

“C’mon, Lil. Be serious.”

I blinked at him, because I was serious. But something caught in my chest and I teared up. Jesse passed me a bundle of tissues. After I moment, I said, “I want to believe that she hates me and that she’s doing this to get even with me. Because if that’s not true, something’s happened to her.” I thought of Ridley, sitting in front of her building at night like a lumpen sentinel. “No one has seen her for months.”

We stared at the television for a while. “Who’d want to harm Claudia?” asked Jesse. “What about Tariq? In the movies, it’s always the husband, or the lover. Like this one.”

I watched Ava Gardner on the screen. She was coming out of the water in a bathing suit, waving at the man she loved, blissfully unaware of his secret and how far he would go to protect his own honor. “Tariq is a psychopath. But I think everything he says about Claudia is the truth. I don’t trust anything else that comes out of his mouth.” I wondered what secret of Martin’s he’d been ready to confide. Thinking of it now made my stomach turn. Knowing that Martin had threatened Kaylee Quan made me sick; in his own way, he was as bad as Tariq.