The Sanatorium(59)

The discovery made her indescribably sad: their mother had chosen to blame herself over Isaac. The ultimate excuse for a boy gone wrong.

“I was just about to tell you,” she says, chasing the thought away. “I spoke to Adele’s boss, Felisa. She said that Adele and Laure had fallen out. Did Laure mention anything to you about it?”

Isaac shakes his head, dark curls slipping across his face. “No. As far as I knew, they were still friends.”

Elin bites down on her lip, frustrated. How is she going to be able to find out what’s gone on between them? Her mind hooks on an idea—Laure’s laptop.

It hadn’t yielded much on first look, but she hadn’t been very thorough as she wasn’t really convinced at the time that Laure was actually missing.

“Let’s take another look at her laptop.” She turns to Isaac. “There might be something we dismissed that might be relevant in light of what we know now.”

Nodding, he stands up. “I’ll get it.”

Once he’s out of earshot, Will looks at her. “You really think there’ll be something on there?”

“I don’t know, but it’s got to be worth a try. I’m going to take another look at her social media, too, see if I’ve missed anything.”

“You know, I think all this, it’s made your decision for you, hasn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Going back to work. For someone who wasn’t sure, you seem pretty well decided now.” His expression is serious. “You’ve come alive, Elin. Doing this.”

“They asked me to help.”

“And you could easily have said no. Explained.”

Elin shrugs. “Maybe.” She doesn’t know how to reply because he’s right—some part of her has come alive, but she knows there’s still a big difference between helping here and going back to work. Her decision isn’t made yet. She thinks about Anna’s e-mails. The e-mails she’s steadfastly ignored.

Leaning back in her chair, Elin picks up her phone, flicking again through Laure’s Instagram.

This time, given what she’s found out, she’s looking for any evidence of Laure with Adele.

She starts scrolling. There’s nothing, tallying with Felisa’s theory of a falling out. It’s two or three months back before she finds her, fitting with the idea that the issue between them was fairly recent.

The first image of them together: Laure in a bar, dressed in a flimsy, strappy top, arm loosely slung around Adele’s bare shoulder. The second is in a dimly lit restaurant, part of a larger group. Someone’s standing back from the table, taking a group shot.

Elin keeps scrolling, goes further back: over four months ago. One image in particular catches her eye. It was taken here, in the hotel lounge. She recognizes the large, futuristic chandelier in the center of the image, the abstract slivers of glass catching the light, bleaching out the image in places.

“Look at this.” She holds up the phone to Will.

Laure’s in the foreground with a man. She’s holding up a glass of pink-hued wine to the camera, head thrown back in laughter. The glass is smeared, dappled with condensation. In the background, sitting at one of the tables, Elin can make out two people, heads bent, not more than a few inches apart.

They’re deep in conversation, their expressions somber.

Although they’re out of focus, she can still make out exactly who they are.

Adele and Lucas.





46





The intimate body language, their postures—it looks like more than polite conversation.

“Adele and Lucas knew each other socially,” Will says slowly.

Elin feels a creeping sense of unease: they definitely knew each other, certainly more than Lucas had implied.

Could the falling out have been over him?

The thought, its depressing predictability, disappoints her.

“What are you looking at?” Isaac asks. He peers over her shoulder. Once again, she catches the bitter scent of beer on his breath.

“I found this.” She tilts the screen of the mobile toward him. “Lucas and Adele, together.”

Isaac sits down beside her. Grabbing the phone from her hand, he pinches the screen, zooming in. “Looks pretty cozy, doesn’t it?” He gives a brittle laugh, eyes igniting with a familiar intensity. “Maybe he was at it with her too?”

“We can’t say that,” Elin replies, her tone carefully neutral.

Isaac continues flicking through Laure’s Instagram. The speed of his movements, the erratic gestures, they bother Elin. She reaches for his hand. “Isaac, stop. We were going to go through the laptop.”

He opens his mouth, about to protest, then closes it.

Elin pulls the laptop toward her, flips it open. This time she decides to work more methodically, starting with the desktop, the folders stacked in neat rows across the screen.

She stares glassily at the sheer number of them, the similarities in labeling—date, names. Most look like work files—Health & Safety, Trainings, Travel. She clicks into them regardless.

Halfway through the list of folders she finds one with a more generic name: Work.

Clicking on it, rather than a series of files, she finds another folder with the same name. Elin’s finger hovers over the file, clicks again.