(BUT WHEN I refused to open up to these boys about Alison, was it really because I couldn’t bring myself to, because it hurt too much, or did I withhold to gain their admiration at my stoicism? Did I, actually, enjoy being their tragic, wounded girlfriend? Deep down, did I revel in the way Alison’s death made me more than myself to these boys? To what extent was my pain a thing I cultivated, a thing I used? Is it possible that these relationships, these boys, were ultimately little more to me than a platform for displaying my suffering and, in doing so, for shoring up my claim to this tragedy, to the death of a sister I was barely old enough to know?)

DESPITE THESE difficulties, I would describe my “college experience” as pretty normal, which is to say that everything I did, whether a winter day spent dug in at the library or a night of dancing capped off by three A.M. pizza, felt equally, salubriously formative. I majored in English and minored in environmental studies. I made plenty of friends. The one worth mentioning, because of how she figures into my time in New York, is Jackie. Jackie was a friend I acquired at the beginning of college more due to proximity than anything—she lived across the hall. Despite our having little in common, our friendship turned out to have staying power. Jackie was an actor (“not musicals”). She saw nothing pretentious about referring to herself as a “thespian,” and though I found this ridiculous, I was also impressed by her sheer gumption. Our relationship consisted mostly of her baring her soul and me listening and proffering advice.

Sometimes I wondered whether, when she wasn’t with me, Jackie brought up her connection to the Alison Thomas murder to people as a kind of currency. I could imagine her, back home in Bethesda for Christmas break, sitting around in someone’s basement with her girlfriends, drinking Yellow Tail:

“You know my good friend Emily I’ve told you about? Her older sister was Alison Thomas. Remember that story from when we were, like, eight?” (I would be referred to as a “good” friend not because Jackie and I were, in fact, especially close, but to emphasize Jackie’s own proximity to Alison.)

“Whoa, seriously?”

Jackie would nod solemnly as if, while her friends might simply consider this to be some novel information, to her it was personal, heavy.

Oh, I didn’t wonder if this happened. Surely it did. There was no doubt in my mind that Jackie trotted out my story for her own benefit. I didn’t even feel mad about it, really, because it was so obvious she couldn’t help herself, and how could you be mad at someone for being the person they were? At least at the time I thought that was why I didn’t feel mad. Thinking about it now, though, the reason seems different. I never let myself get mad about anything back then.

AFTER COLLEGE, I found a job as an assistant to an editor at a publishing house in Manhattan. When I told my parents I would be moving to New York, they were supportive in the polite, aloof way I had come to expect. With Jackie and two Craigslist strangers, also recent college grads, I found an apartment in Prospect Heights. The kitchen was the size of a closet and my bedroom had no closet at all. The apartment was on the ground floor, and out back a cracked concrete patio was littered with things tenants on higher floors tossed out their windows—beer cans, cigarette butts, losing scratch tickets. We figured with some twinkle lights strung up it would be heaven.

Before I moved in and began work, I flew west to spend one last summer with my parents. Two months at home with mom and dad while my friends worked fun, sunburned jobs in resort towns in New England or retraced Che Guevara’s motorcycle journey as far as Valparaíso. My parents had not asked me to do this, nor did I want to do it. It wasn’t just that without Alison I felt I had to fulfill the role of two children. I did things that, were Alison alive, neither one of us would have done. I pitied my parents in a way I did not pity myself. It is easy to discern the contours of other people’s pain, much harder to recognize one’s own.

My parents were in their mid-fifties. My father’s hair had thinned and grayed. My mother had recently had her first knee replacement. Over and over they told me how happy they were that I was there, how wonderful it was to spend “quality time” together. My mother cooked my favorite foods. My father bought tickets for the things we used to do when I was a kid—Dodgers games, sci-fi movies. Their insistence gave them away. I don’t mean they weren’t happy I was there. I could see it in their eyes—a love so strong it hurt. That’s what I mean. They would be relieved when I left. The house would turn quiet again, and they would feel better.

One day when I came back from the gym, I entered the house quietly, and before I let them know I was back, I watched them. Through the kitchen window, I could see my father out in the yard, tending his jewel box garden. My mother sat in the sunny window seat in the living room, a chenille blanket over her feet, reading. I was seeing them without me: two people living out their separate lonelinesses side by side.

A few days before I flew to New York, I went into my father’s home office. There, in his desk drawer, I found the photographs of our vacation at Indigo Bay. They were faded and splotched with fingerprints, and I wondered if looking at them had turned into a kind of compulsion for my father. Perhaps he had looked at the photographs so many times he no longer really saw Alison, had drained the power out of the images years ago. Maybe, subconsciously, that had been the point of the triplicate images to begin with: to stare at my sister until she lost coherence, like reading a word over and over until it starts to crack up. I removed one copy of each picture and brought them with me to Brooklyn. I put them in a shoe box under my bed along with a few other mementos—graduation tassel, prom corsage. The box gathered dust while, above it, I watched Netflix on my laptop while eating salt-and-vinegar chips; cuddled with Jackie after her boyfriend dumped her; had sex, often inebriated, with friends of friends. I rarely took out the photographs. It was enough just to know they were there.

LOOKING BACK, what strikes me is how ordinarily my life developed for years after Alison’s death. I had friends and boyfriends. I excelled academically. Experimented in typical quantities with the kinds of drugs a fundamentally risk-averse girl could feel more or less comfortable with: I smoked pot on weekends, nibbled once on ’shrooms in Prospect Park, imbibed a few sips of absinthe at a party. I fretted about my weight, hamster-wheeled on an elliptical machine after work, caved and ate two egg rolls for dinner. At work, I decorated my cubicle with a framed photograph of myself on the rim of the Grand Canyon and a mediocre sketch I’d done of a cathedral during a semester abroad in Grenoble. My job paid a pittance and was glamour-adjacent, and therefore fit perfectly with a certain vision of what a girl’s early years in New York ought to look like: fetching coffee for a MacArthur genius; ferrying a portfolio of illustrations through the sleet to the West Village brownstone of a writer I adored; referring to best-selling authors in the informal parlance of the office, according to which Astrid Teague was just “Astrid,” and Ian Mann’s forthcoming book was simply “the new Mann.” On first dates, there was a nifty trick I liked to perform, where I would pull the boy into a bookstore, pick up a novel off the display table, flip to the back, and show him, in the acknowledgments, my name. Every Sunday afternoon I posted up at a café, pen in hand and the pages of a manuscript stacked before me, and when I caught the glances of people at nearby tables I quickly looked back down in a way that conveyed that I was busy making an important contribution to the creative economy.

As it happened, the editor I worked for mostly acquired mysteries. Ian Mann published a book a year about a psychologically damaged private investigator. Astrid Teague wrote atmospheric whodunits set in Cornwall, where she’d grown up (and where she was now rehabbing a dilapidated manor house, which had recently been captured in all its shabby-chic glory in a Martha Stewart Living profile, “Astrid Teague Comes Home.”) Many of the books I worked on turned on the mystery of a girl’s death. A beautiful young body turns up in small-town Maine or in an eightieth-floor hotel room in Shanghai. Sometimes the girls didn’t turn up at all—they vanished without a trace, evaporated into their surroundings. In my favorite of Astrid’s novels, The Girl in the Picture, a woman’s body was discovered by a boy and his English setter in a cave on the Cornish coast. The woman had no wallet on her, no identification of any kind. Nobody came forward to claim her, nor did she match any missing person reports. But she did have a camera, and the photographs she had taken before her death became the clues a local detective used to uncover the identity of a hauntingly beautiful woman nobody seemed to miss.