Valentin dots the paper with a jab, then flips the cover closed and secures the elastic strap. “Believe it or not, Miss Darby, I have done this before. Mr. Bronn was working at the Paris Saint-Germain hospital that afternoon. He is on video purchasing cigarettes from a tabac at the time Angela disappeared.”

I rack my memory trying to recall whether he’s ever smelled of smoke. We only spent a few hours together each day.

“There is something else,” he continues. “There have been new developments—”

“Oh thank God. I knew you didn’t come here with only bad news.”

Valentin exhales. He takes a long, slow look at the ceiling. The certainty I’m wrong punts my snide optimism.

“There have been new developments in an adjacent case. As part of your sister’s investigation, we traced Angela’s activities to several days before her disappearance. On Friday the twenty-ninth, she was at the Sorbonne. On Thursday she only left her apartment to perform dissertation work and to go to dinner at Les Deux Moulins with Bronn. On Wednesday she visited Emmanuelle Wood, and Tuesday she was seen on the Champs-Élysées. What do you know of Emmanuelle? You texted me about her.”

Manu. Angela’s frenemy. The blood leaches from my face. “Angela never mentioned her to me, but we didn’t speak for a long time. I don’t know much,” I hedge, wanting him to confirm before dishing Nour’s hearsay. “Why?”

Valentin whips out his pad again and makes a check mark on the first page. “I am sorry to add to the discomfort you must be feeling, Miss Darby, but I must confirm your text: Miss Wood and your sister were known to be hostile to one another. Now Miss Wood is a missing person; she has not been seen in several weeks. Angela may be implicated in her disappearance.”

I stare at him, through him, struggling to understand. “How is that possible? Angela has been declared missing or dead for weeks, too. My sister had some tension with this Wood woman, and now you’re investigating her as a suspect?”

“Wood went missing just two days before Angela did. The day Angela visited her apartment.” Valentin returns my glare with steady eye contact. Not a flinch from him, while I feel myself begin to shake.

It’s an ugly thing to think, let alone say out loud, but a tiny, cowardly part of me was anticipating this information, waiting for some example of it to crop up—Angela was capable of violence. My stomach clenches the way it always does when I stop to think of my last day on the beach with my sister. The phantom smell of the ocean hits my nostrils, and my mouth waters at the sudden taste of salty air.