It’s difficult to separate things out. To determine how much of my disgust at these men was genuine, and how much I was drumming it up, seizing upon an easy opportunity to feel disgusted, indignant, violated by anonymous people I would never know or have to confront. These online forums. Craig Sheppard lining his pockets. The memoir that actor’s ex-girlfriend published where she described Alison’s body. Dying for Fun’s absurd version of her death (Apollo! My god…). The whole razzle-dazzle enterprise of the Alison Thomas Economy—did these things actually pain me, did they really touch the heart of my own personal trauma? Yes and no, they did and they didn’t, and this is what made it so hard to parse my own feelings, to separate what I did feel from all the things I could feel. At times, it could be very difficult to distinguish where my authentic pain over my sister’s death ended and where a performative emotionality, a giving over to the drama opened up by Alison, began.

AS MY surveillance spread so, too, did Clive Richardson’s power over my life. Before I began to follow him on his walks, he had been contained by the Little Sweet. It had been possible for me to leave him behind not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally—to go to the gym, for instance, and spend forty minutes on the elliptical feeling inferior to the cellulite-free woman on the machine beside me, and wonder what it must be like to have thighs like that, and remind myself that everybody has problems and surely this woman was no exception, and ponder what they might be, and imagine her cowering on a staircase as a girl, listening to her parents yell and throw things, and then, when she wiped down her machine and our eyes met briefly, to smile at her with great sympathy, and only afterward, as I engaged in some perfunctory stretching on a mat strewn with unnerving hairs, realize that I had not thought of Clive in over an hour. But once I began to follow him, he broke free. His routines became my routines, his patterns my patterns.

One night, he stopped at a church and went inside. I sat on a bench at a nearby bus stop to wait. He was not inside long, maybe ten minutes, and when he emerged, his face was composed. Whatever he had been praying over, I could discern no trace of it. Another evening, he walked by a bodega with buckets of rot-edged roses and blue daisies out front. As he passed them, he reached out his hand and skimmed his fingertips ever so lightly against the flowers.

ALISON HAD kept a diary. It wasn’t the usual thing, no lock-and-key notebook with KEEP OUT!!! on the cover. It was an audio diary, recorded on one of those cassette players for children with a pink plastic microphone. The player had been mine originally, a birthday gift loaded with parental intentions for the shy child—Look how much fun you’ll have singing, Clairey! I never used it and at some point Alison appropriated it for her own purposes. Many nights she retreated to her bedroom and recorded. I think she enjoyed hearing herself talk. I don’t mean she was vain, nothing like that. I used to sit on the floor outside her room, letting her muffled voice wash over me with the distinct sense that on the other side of the closed door something sacred was transpiring—my sister’s soul, bared to the night.

I knew my parents had the cassettes because when I was eighteen I had asked my mother what happened to them. She told me they were in the box on the top shelf of the hall closet, along with Alison’s dance trophies and yearbooks and jazz shoes. When I asked if my parents had listened to them, my mother’s face tightened. She was going to cry, and I felt at once guilty and angry. Guilty because I had known my question would upset her and had asked it anyway, angry because I was the child and she was the mother and shouldn’t she be making things easier for me, not the other way around? “I started to once,” she said. “But I only listened for a minute or two. It wasn’t right.”

On an evening in late October, I called my mother; it was just after six P.M. in New York, dark and cold.

“It’s so good to hear from you, sweetie.” This was what she always said, as if I were doing some extraordinary kindness by calling her. I winced. I pictured her in their sunny kitchen, living a falsely warm, bright existence—didn’t she know it was really night? Didn’t she know it was almost winter?

“You caught me in the middle of making white gazpacho. I rediscovered the recipe in this ancient cookbook I bought after college. Very woo-woo.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “You marinate cucumbers, green grapes, bread, and almonds in salt and let it sit a few hours. Then you puree it and whisk in some yogurt. Isn’t that a neat technique?”

My mother could always be counted on to prattle about something we both knew neither of us cared about—the plot of a movie she’d seen with my father, a charity auction she had attended and the offerings donated by various local businesses, a nifty trick she’d learned for chopping onions without crying. (She would send me the YouTube.) My mother was not a superficial woman. She was, in fact, in possession of a piercing intelligence, but for some maddening reason she seemed determined to keep this a secret. She’d been a literature major in college. According to family lore, she was solely responsible for getting our father through his own college coursework. (“Your mother’s so smart she tricked me into being the breadwinner,” he was fond of saying.) On our bookshelves at home, dispersed among our father’s legal procedurals and thick biographies of great American leaders, were my mother’s volumes of poetry and the slender, peculiar novels of a female Brazilian writer with whom she was enamored. On Saturday mornings when I was a child, as our family life went on noisily around her, my mother would sit on the couch in the living room with her feet curled beneath her and read as if she were alone in a quiet room, which, in her mind, I think she was. But she never spoke to us about the things she read, and when she set down the book she became our mother again, concerned with locating shin guards and checking worksheets, a woman so ordinary and unglamorous that I remember Alison once theorizing to me that she and Aunt Caroline couldn’t possibly be blood sisters—one of them must have been switched at birth, or the product of an illicit affair. I think Alison and I both grew up feeling that our mother kept the best of herself to herself, that she was guarding something, protecting something, from us. So, no, my mother was not a naturally superficial woman; superficiality was a thing she had chosen, and after Alison’s death she chose it more and more. I think she was terribly lonely in Pasadena, despite the busy social life she maintained there; it was an existential loneliness that had everything to do with Alison and that therefore could not be cured. With her bland chatter, I think she was trying to talk her way out of the loneliness, to paper over all the unspoken things, but it never worked, it was all still there, and so she went on talking, and hoping, and talking.

“Very neat,” I said.

“I made it once years ago but I forgot all about it. I was cleaning out—I’ve been trying to clean out the bookcases, and—”

“Mom.”

“Hmm?”

“I was wondering. You know Alison’s diaries?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind sending them to me?”

She was quiet a moment. “Sure, sweetheart,” she said finally. “I’ll make copies and pop them in the mail as soon as I can.”

I knew she would not ask my reasons for making this request, what had happened or what I was thinking and feeling that made me want them. I didn’t even bother proffering a made-up explanation. It was a little unkind of me, and I knew that; my request surely made her worry, and I could easily have told her something to assuage her concern, but I didn’t. But you have to understand how much it hurt. No, Honey, are you sure? No, Do you think that’s really the best thing? My mother hid away in her fragile sweetness, and I hated her for the ironic way her fragility protected her.