‘But I gotta go upload,’ says Shawn.
‘Can that wait half an hour, dear?’
He grunts something and she leaves. Two minutes later he grunts something else to us and says he’ll be back in ten minutes.
‘We’ll organise for her things to come back to Nottingham,’ says Mum. ‘I can sort it out. Get it all shipped and put back in your bedroom. We still keep your bedroom, Molly.’
‘I know you do, Mum.’ I stayed there last Christmas, along with my sister. Two single beds separated by a strip of no man’s land. Two small desks. Two single wardrobes.
‘We’ll get shipping quotes,’ says Dad, more to himself than to us. ‘It might be expensive. I’ll ask Detective Martinez if we can take back some personal items in our checked baggage next week.’
‘I’d like some of her things,’ I say. ‘I want to fly back with them. Her shawl, maybe.’ I walk to the shawl folded over her sofa armrest. I pick it up and hold it to my face and something unlocks inside me. Facing a sofa, facing a wall, the scent in the shawl, it breaks me. Armani Mania. I buckle. My tears soak the loose-weave fabric and I hold it tight to my face and I cry. I’m aware of Mum crying behind me, Dad holding her, saying, ‘Let her, Elizabeth. Just let her.’
The convulsing stops. I sit down on the sofa, the shawl still tight to my eyes. She was my other half. Spouses say that but it’s never true. We were each other’s other half. If we had ever had children they would have been cousins but they would also have been genetic half-siblings, we were that closely connected. We entered this life together. And now she’s gone.
‘I gotta leave soon, so . . .’ says Shawn from the doorway. ‘I need to lock this place up, Mom told me.’
‘Just five minutes, lad,’ says Dad.
‘Sure, no worries. That’s cool,’ says Shawn.
I wipe my eyes on the shawl and take some deep breaths.
‘She loved you so very much,’ says Mum.
And the truth is that Mum is being kind here but she has no real idea how much she loved me and how much I loved her. Our relationship was deeper than she could know. It was something that existed just between us. A private thing. Mum loved us both but she cannot understand the depths of our relationship. Nobody can.
That photo pops into my head. Shawn and KT together.
‘How well did you know my sister?’ I ask him.
He points to his own chest. ‘Wait, what?’
‘There’s a photo of you together on the board in her bedroom.’
‘Molly,’ says Dad.
‘You guys went out or something?’ I ask. ‘What the hell happened to her?’
‘No, wait. Nothing, I mean . . .’
‘You dated her? You wanted to date her?’
‘No. There’s a photo up?’
I point to the photo pinboard. To the Polaroid. To the T-shirt.
‘Oh, that,’ he says, laughing uncomfortably. ‘No, you see, that was a night when her friends were here and I came upstairs for a minute, no big deal, they were playing music. Her boyfriend was here too, so no. Scott was here then. It was nothing, I swear.’
Some alarm goes off on Shawn’s phone.
‘You know KT’s boyfriend?’ I say.
‘I don’t know him, I just met him a coupla times, he was always hanging around. He smokes so I’d see him outside, you know. No smoking in the building, Mom’s rules.’
‘Do you like Scott, Shawn? He a good guy? He ever hurt KT in any way?’
‘What? No. Not that I heard about. Listen, this isn’t anything to do with me. I just live here, man. Sbarra’s one of those guys, you know the kind. Like a ladies’ man, seems like he never had any problems, no obstacles, just cruising through life and all the doors opening, you know? Like a car driving through green light after green light. Listen, I gotta go now. It’s work, I’m sorry. I gotta lock this place up.’
‘Was Scott up here the day KT died, Shawn?’
Shawn looks at the bed, then at the window.
‘Listen. I gotta go, it’s—’
‘Was he here?’
‘Scott Sbarra? Six foot four, blue eyes, two-twenty? Yeah. Scott was here. Hard to miss the guy.’
Chapter 10
Leaving KT’s apartment feels permanent. Like closing the book on her life. I get a knot in my stomach just thinking about it.
Mum and I linger on the building steps while Dad tries to hail a cab.
‘How do you feel?’ asks Mum.
How do I feel? How do I feel? Lost, angry, terrified, alone. Desperately sad. Like my twin was stolen from me by this neighbourhood, this mass of people. I feel like flying straight back to London and locking myself inside my apartment to decompress.