AS I pored over the articles, I encountered the same two photographs of Alison over and over. The first was taken after her performance in the school dance recital her senior year. Her cheeks and eyelids are brushed with glittery makeup, so that she seems to shimmer—celestial, angelic. Her smile is soft and dreamy, an unusual facial expression for my sister. Put simply, she does not look like herself. Maybe you’ve experienced this: you see a photo of someone you know well, and they look like an altogether different person. What makes this phenomenon possible? Is it some trick of the light, distorting the planes and angles of the face? Something about the transference of a three-dimensional form to two dimensions? Is it that we’re accustomed to seeing people in motion and the total stillness of an image throws us off? A final possibility seems most convincing to me: We don’t know what people look like. We know only what they look like to us. We have an idea of them, shaped by our affections, our memories, and this is the real distortion. In this photograph my sister looks like some romantic ideal of a girl too lovely for this world. A girl fated for death.

The second picture is different. It was taken at a dorm party a month before Alison was killed. The room is dark, lit only by the harsh flash of the camera. The party must have been pajama-themed. Some boys wear boxers. Others are dressed ironically in fuzzy onesies. There is a keg visible in the corner, plastic cups in every hand and cluttering every surface. My sister wears a tiny blue slip—negligee would be the proper term, I think. Her nipples press visibly against the silk. She is dancing with her arms raised over her head, a cup in her hand. Her hair is sweaty, her eyes rimmed with smudged eyeliner. She smiles seductively at whoever is behind the camera.

Don’t you understand? My sister was an innocent, blameless in her horrific fate. And it was all her fault.

MY OBSERVATION of Clive continued. What I saw was always the same, his habits repetitive and fastidious: that crimson stew and a beer, then a second when he’d drained the first. Silent nods hello to the other regulars. A napkin crumpled in a fist. I watched until he rose to scrape his plate into the trash. Then I hurried down the sidewalk, not slowing until I reached my apartment.

Of course, sometimes I had evening plans, or something came up. For instance, one afternoon Jackie texted that she needed to see me for “emergency girl talk,” and that night we met for drinks at her favorite bar near our old apartment. Jackie ran late as a rule. I arrived on time, then sat there twiddling my thumbs and excoriating myself. Why did I always set myself up to wait for her? What was it that rendered me incapable of deviating from this pattern? (I think I know the answer to these questions now. I think I liked this pattern, this banal benign and predicament in which to seethe.) This time, my annoyance was compounded by the fact that Jackie was keeping me from Clive—what if tonight was the night something happened, and I missed it? I worked myself up into quite a state before she arrived, and as usual I shelved this feeling when Jackie whirled through the door, half an hour late and full of apologies.

The reason for the emergency girl talk was that Jackie was “just so overwhelmed.” I listened for a long time as she described the sources of her trouble with mounting distress. She wasn’t a priority to her boyfriend. She hated her job. She never had time to practice her “craft.” (Though she seemed to have plenty of time, I thought, to attend her boyfriend’s dodgeball league games and to transform bushels of produce into six ounces of juice twice a day. I didn’t say this.)

“Of course you’re overwhelmed,” I said instead. “It’s too much.”

Jackie nodded. “Right? It would be too much for anyone.”

There were tears in her eyes. I hugged her. I stroked her hair. I offered what seemed to me rather boilerplate advice: She should deal with one thing at a time. Step by step. Et cetera.

Jackie blew her nose into a cocktail napkin. “How are you so fucking wise?”

We stayed at the bar for another hour.

“So, what’s new with you?” she asked as she tossed her credit card down on the check.

I thought of Clive Richardson, of the Little Sweet, of Alison’s obituary and the golden-haired, rose-lipped child from Dying for Fun who was and was not me.

“Nothing much.”

AT WORK one day I went on Facebook to track down Nika Ivanova, Alison’s roommate at Princeton. I found her easily. She was Nika (Ivanova) Cunningham now; she lived in Philadelphia and worked for a pharmaceutical company. Her profile picture was a selfie in which she sat sandwiched between two freckle-faced boys on a chairlift. I sent her a message:

You probably don’t remember me, but I’m Alison Thomas’s younger sister. I’m working on a project to compile remembrances about Alison. It would mean so much to have a contribution from you. I know you didn’t know Alison long, but she loved being your roommate. Maybe we could arrange a phone call and I can tell you more about what I have in mind?

I felt weird for lying, but pinning my request to a formal project seemed to normalize it. Amazing, the power of a premise.

Nika replied that evening. She would be very happy to help me in whatever way she could. We scheduled a phone call for a night later that week, but a few minutes after we were supposed to talk, Nika texted to cancel. She had forgotten it was her turn to pick up her son’s tae kwon do carpool. Twenty minutes later, I was standing outside of The Little Sweet. Stew, beer, nod hello. For over an hour, I wandered the neighborhood, circling back to watch Clive as often as I dared. The streets were busy with people. A mom herding three kids in school uniforms. An elderly man leaning against a storefront and sipping a pineapple soda. The periodic upward rush of bodies from the subway at Nostrand. A stray white kid hefting a mesh laundry basket down the sidewalk. When I circled back once more and found that Clive had departed while I was walking, I was left with the unsettling feeling of a necessary process cut short.

Nika canceled again the next time we were supposed to speak—her other son’s basketball game had gone into overtime. Again I left my apartment at once and headed to Church Avenue. Stew, beer, nod hello. Clive maintained this ritual with such consistency that I half wondered if he knew he was being watched and was determined to reveal nothing of himself. At times it seemed to me as if we were engaged in a battle of wills. I had not yet found my way past the mesmeric repetition of his routines. But I was not concerned. I would wait as long as it took. I was patient.

NIKA AND I finally spoke that Sunday.

“Sorry I was so hard to get on the phone. This week has been completely insane,” she said, in a rote tone that suggested that for Nika, every week was completely insane. In the background I could hear the crinkle of what sounded like grocery bags being unpacked.

I had a single memory of Nika. When my family arrived at Alison’s dorm to move her into her room, Nika and her parents were already there, arguing with each other in urgent, whispered Bulgarian as they looked down at her bed. They hadn’t known to buy extra-long sheets and now they couldn’t make her bed. When they realized we were standing in the doorway, they looked stricken. Nika was dressed in a pleated skirt, a blouse, and loafers with a low, square heel. My sister wore mesh shorts and flip-flops. I understood implicitly that Alison was wearing the right thing and Nika was wearing the wrong thing. In my head she was still the painfully overdressed girl pressed close to her parents.

I told Nika I wanted to create a book of memories about my sister. “I was so young when she was killed. I’ve been finding it really therapeutic lately to hear stories from people who knew her.”

I heard the refrigerator door opening and closing, the garbage disposal churning. Nika’s inattention wasn’t hurtful, exactly. It was callous in a bland, quotidian way I didn’t really hold against her. My tragedy wasn’t hers, and that wasn’t her fault.

“Your sister was a big deal for me,” Nika began. “I could not have been more clueless when I showed up at Princeton. We immigrated when I was ten, but my parents still barely spoke English. I had this horrible bushy hair. I used to go to the dining hall, fill a mug with soup, and go back and eat it in our room because I was so intimidated by the other kids at the tables. I got a sixty-three on my first calculus test. I went to this awful high school in Chicago. I had no preparation whatsoever. I just cried and cried about it. There were tutors you could go to, but I was afraid to. I literally thought if I went to them, they’d realize Princeton had made a mistake accepting me and kick me out. I had no idea what to—Excuse me a minute.” I could hear her hand press against the receiver. Not now, Logan, mommy’s on the phone. “Sorry about that. Anyway, right, I had no idea what to do.”

“That must have been hard.” I straightened a paper clip and used the tip to clean under my fingernails. Her tragedy was not my tragedy, either.

“Your sister made such a difference for me. I’m not just saying that. She included me. The first month of school I made zero friends. I was basically a recluse. Your sister obviously knew everyone on campus within five minutes, and everyone wanted to be her friend. She just had that personal power, you know?”