It was pure coincidence, me working on these books. I had applied for over a dozen jobs, after all. I hadn’t sought this genre out intentionally, any more than the girl in the next cubicle who worked on popular science, or the girl down the hall whose domain was military history and the occasional sports memoir. My boss didn’t know my personal history, and I was proud of the professionalism I brought to this work. For instance, one of my responsibilities was to write discussion questions about these novels for book clubs.

What do you think would have happened if Leah had survived the fire? Would she and Colin have reconciled? Why or why not?

While Rose Van Kleef believes that Emmaline might still be alive, Orrin knows that she is dead. Which do you think is the more difficult circumstance, knowing that a loved one is dead, or not knowing?

How did you react to the comic moments in this otherwise dark novel?

I would write these questions, and my boss would tell me I had done a good job, and her praise would make me happy. If for fleeting moments the whole arrangement began to rankle, I would remind myself that people had every right to enjoy these stories, just as I enjoyed books about all kinds of terrible things that had happened to other people but not to me. What else, in the end, were stories for? This sentiment instantly made me feel better—not, it seems to me now, because I believed it, exactly, but because it seemed a very adult stance to take.

In any event, my living situations, too, affirmed a certain vision of what twenty-something urban life ought to be. For two years I stayed in the shitty Prospect Heights apartment. (On cool summer evenings, when the sky was the brushed-velvet way it gets after a nine P.M. sunset, the twinkle lights really did grant a celestial loveliness to that cracked patio.) From there, I moved to a brownstone in Bed-Stuy where a dozen creative types had set up a communal living system—a rotation of cooking and cleaning duties, weekly “family meetings.” When the novelty of this arrangement gave way to weariness at its perpetual high drama, I left for an illegal sublet in the basement of a formerly grand, now-dilapidated old mansion on the far eastern edge of what might, with some fudging, be considered Ditmas Park, just a few blocks from the heart of Caribbean Flatbush. My studio had two half windows at the top of one wall, with a ground-level view of the sidewalk, so that from my desk I could watch the disembodied feet of passersby: black stiletto boots, duct-tape-patched Adidas sneakers, green galoshes. The room was lit by the garish yellow light of two bare bulbs hung from the ceiling.

I didn’t have to live like this. A tidy allowance from my parents flowed directly into my checking account every month. I suppose I chose this arrangement because I was a privileged kid eager to prove to myself that I didn’t need the comforts I’d never been without (and eager, too, I might add, to do this before I got too old to enjoy it). It was the sort of thing, in other words, that you do not because you want to do it, but because you want to have done it, to have a story you’ll share, you imagine, years later at a cocktail party or on the sideline at a soccer game (your child pure magic clomping through the grass in tiny cleats).

I admit I was rather impressed with myself for living in a building where I was one of the only white tenants. What a sharp little pride I felt, riding the 2 home from work and watching the other white passengers empty out, and what a sweet triumph it was on those nights when I outlasted them all. When, six months after I moved in, construction began on a luxury condo three blocks from my studio, I felt genuinely aggrieved. I suppose I must also have thought myself pretty high-minded to live where I did, among the people I lived among, despite what had happened to my sister. This must have been part of why I chose to live there, on the fringe of the largest Caribbean neighborhood in the city, right? To get to think these things about myself.

I took it as my working assumption that for my neighbors my presence was not entirely welcome, and so I smiled very warmly at everyone but spoke to no one, what I thought of as “not bothering people.” All in all, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of charting a course through my life in New York that was as palatable as possible—I had not chosen to live in the lily-white postgrad brovana of Murray Hill. I was a gentrifier but, I imagined, an unobtrusive one. I see now that it was not so simple, that in keeping myself apart from my neighbors I was trying to collect a moral credit for living there without really living there, and that this was bound up with a set of more general misapprehensions: that unobtrusiveness was some sort of high virtue; that it was even possible at all; that I could inhabit this building, borough, world, life, without casting out ripples. But I was twenty-five—not so young I couldn’t have known better, but young enough that I didn’t.

Because of this stance, I came to know my neighbors only by their quirks. A stooped woman who must have been at least eighty fetched her mail each evening in a nightgown and a pair of bright white Reeboks. An old man who spoke Spanish wore a NASCAR cap and was never without his terrier, Jefe, a yappy, trembling creature with cloudy cataracted eyes. I assumed my neighbors identified me in a similar way. I was the white girl who came home from work every night toting a premade chopped salad. The only other white tenant was a man with a scruffy beard and an affinity for scarves who lived on the first floor and played guitar from two to three-thirty A.M. nightly, a habit which would have been merely aggravating someplace else, but which I found genuinely distressing here, convinced that it reflected poorly not only on him but also on me, on us.

During those first few years in New York I was, in short, living in that period of playacting, of whimsical elective poverty—improvisational dinner parties with mismatched plates, Saturdays scavenging secondhand shops for the perfect two-dollar blouse—that is so common among the children of affluence. The word I would use to describe myself then would not be happy—not that I wasn’t; I was, or at least, I thought I was—but unencumbered. I believed I was enjoying my present life while anticipating, with a minimum of anxiety, the arrival of the next life stage, and the one after that. My illegal underground sublet in “Ditmas Park” would become a one-bedroom rental in Boerum Hill would become purchasing a brownstone in Park Slope, or a condo on the Upper West Side. Pithy remarks at editorial meetings would become acquiring my own books would become launching a best seller. That’s what really strikes me, I guess, about that time. It’s not that my life was ordinary, but that I fell for it so completely, that I failed so utterly to detect within myself the darker currents that must have been there all along.

SOMETIMES I thought I saw Alison. She picked up a box of cereal in the Flatbush Co-op and scanned the nutrition information. She jogged past me in Prospect Park, a beagle on a red leash tugging her forward. She slipped into a taxi in the rain. The Alisons darted. They slipped around corners. They were there and not there. They were always teenagers.

ONE DAY, I ducked out of the office at eleven A.M. for my annual dermatology checkup. It was early October, one of those blue-skied, ludicrously crisp days when the bustling midtown sidewalks seem to hum. At the dermatologist’s I sat for over an hour in the waiting room, occupying myself with whatever inexplicable magazines the office subscribed to. In the examining room, I changed into a paper gown. “Sorry for the wait. I was held up by a gangrenous toe,” Dr. Schwartz said when he finally came into the room. He made small talk as he inspected my skin with a small magnifying glass. Did you have a good summer? How are things at work? He had a strategy of pretending he remembered who you were. “You wear sunscreen,” he said in that doctorly way—not a question, but an entreaty for me to reply in the affirmative, whatever the truth, so that we might move this thing along.

“See you in a year,” he told me when he’d completed his examination. I crunched out of the paper gown and changed back into my work clothes. I had been away from the office for nearly two hours, much longer than I’d intended, and I was in a hurry to get back. I walked quickly to Lexington, weaving around a girl with her nose in her phone, a towheaded family pointing up at the Chrysler Building. At Fifty-fourth Street, I held out my arm just as a taxi turned the corner into view—a small, delicious victory.

I spent the short ride to the office checking work e-mail on my phone—a nervous missive from Kris in publicity about an author’s botched radio interview, a note from the marketing director inviting the assistants to help ourselves to the tray of leftover wraps in the kitchen. When the taxi pulled up to the curb in front of my office building a few minutes later, I entered a tip on the touch screen and swiped my credit card.

“Thank you,” the driver said softly from the other side of the Plexiglas partition that separates passenger from driver.