Sitting on the edge of the bed, it felt like the year since the apartment had been mine had multiplied into ten. I’d left it behind with almost everything I owned when I’d moved to Spain. Why had I been in such a rush? My own personal life was a shambles, but… My eyes fell on a silver bracelet and I made a strangled sound. It looked almost innocent, sitting atop the scarred wood of the old dresser. I stood and grabbed it, then rolled it around in my hands. It was an inch-wide bangle with an interlacing Irish scrollwork pattern on its surface. The inscription read For Lily, With Love Always, Dad.

For a moment I thought I’d burst into tears. It wasn’t awful enough that Claudia was dead; now I was reminded how much I hated her sometimes. The bracelet was the last Christmas present I ever had from my father. He’d even let me open it on Christmas Eve. We’ll have to wrap it up tight again, he’d said, imagine the hell your mother will give me otherwise. Then he’d died that night and I’d treasured and guarded his gift. I’d worn it to sleep as a teenager, afraid my mother would sell it for brandy or gin. Eighteen months ago, when I’d allowed a very sick Claudia to move in with me, it went missing. My sister had hepatitis then, and her normally pale skin was flushed yellow with jaundice. You don’t think I took it, do you? she’d said, the picture of frail innocence. Deep down, I’d always known she had. Even when she wasn’t shooting heroin she needed cash to buy her more-than-state-allotted doses of methadone, which provided its own high. But I’d never suspected she would steal it just to take it away from me. Dropping onto the bed, I took deep breaths and tried to pull myself together. I hadn’t thought I could be sadder or angrier or more miserable than I was when I found out my sister was dead, but I was wrong.

CHAPTER 2

I don’t know how long I sat there, surrounded by the ghosts of my past, before I heard the knock at the door. For a moment I lost my breath. Was I hallucinating now–or, more likely, hearing noise from an apartment down the hall? It came again, sharp and insistent. Snapping the silver bracelet securely around my wrist, I retraced my steps to the living room. The peephole revealed a blond woman I didn’t recognize. When I opened the door, I noticed that she was tall, five foot ten without her heels, in her mid-forties, broad-shouldered but elegantly slender. She was simply but expensively dressed in a silk blouse and tailored pants.