IT WENT on like this. And something began to happen. At the beginning of each walk, I would be filled with the fear I described earlier, with a sense of the danger posed by Clive and the risk that I was taking in following him. But after thirty minutes, an hour, the experience shifted. It happened without my noticing, like slipping from waking to dreaming. It no longer felt like I was following him, but like we were on this walk together, linked. Eventually, even this we faded away; it was no longer the two of us traveling these dark streets, but a single mind, a memory, endeavoring through the step, step, step of these constitutionals to travel beyond some perimeter it could never seem to reach. If we kept walking long enough, I would be seized by the certainty that we were not alone; we were being watched, trailed by figures who flickered on the periphery, shrouded in darkness. A hand reaching out, beckoning. The pounding of hooves. A flare of laughter, rising from the streets like steam, then gone. Shh. Don’t tell.

ON HALLOWEEN, the old woman in my building sat on the front stoop in her white sneakers distributing Good & Plenty to crestfallen fairies and firefighters. I had been invited to a party at the apartment of a college friend on Pineapple Street and decided that I would go. I’d fallen into arrears with my friends, ignoring messages and invitations; attending seemed an efficient means of digging myself out. The party was an annual thing, and in prior years I’d spent quite a bit of time and effort thinking up and executing my costume—the year before, if memory serves, I’d gone as Frida Kahlo. But this year I had neither the time nor the inclination, and so I put on brown pants and a brown sweater, picked up a few twigs from the tree outside my apartment, and declared myself a tree. My non-costume turned out to be a hit, and at first I was having a pretty good time, sliding into the social rhythm I hadn’t realized I’d missed. Gin and tonic in a Solo cup. Jackie squealing, “Where have you been, girl?” as she petted my shoulder. Laden chitchat with a guy I’d hooked up with a few months earlier. A group of us climbing the ladder to the peach-soft roof to pass around a joint—smoke and cold air and the stark sounds of our laughter against the glitter of Manhattan across the water.

But when I climbed back down into the hot, raucous party everything was wrong. I looked around—there was a girl dressed as a Warhol painting, her face covered in red dots; Jackie was a “sexy farmer,” a canny critique of the Sexy Halloween Costume that nevertheless allowed her to show off her midriff. My gaze pinged from face to face in the semidarkness. What was I doing here? Clive was out there, and I was not with him. I tried to get myself to stay, to enjoy myself, but I was startled to find that I could no longer tolerate a night away from him. I slipped out early without saying goodbye.

Looking back, I can see that my pursuit of Clive Richardson was beginning to be about something more than gathering clues, that I was falling under the grip of something I could not control. But I did not allow myself to see this then. Maybe if I had, it all could have ended differently.

I got a lot of flak for publishing my memoir. People said it was a shameless cash grab. I got called a hanger-on, a fame whore, a starfucker. I don’t think any of those people actually bothered to read my book, because if they had they would have seen that I wrote every word of it straight from my heart.

After I found the girl, I went to therapy. I worked with a life coach. I embraced a vegan diet. I tried Xanax, Zoloft, microdosing. I got into reiki and did a four-day silent meditation retreat. I even followed this guru for a while. Her hugs were supposed to cure you, it didn’t matter what was wrong with you. During her North American tour, I went to see her at the Sheraton near LAX. I waited in line for three hours. When it was my turn, I approached the dais and the guru wrapped me in an embrace so powerful it felt like it originated at the center of my soul. I swear I could feel it wiping everything away. A new beginning. Or so I thought. But on my drive back to Santa Monica, I was stopped in traffic on the 405 and it happened again—the girl appeared in my mind. That bloated white arm, reaching out to me.

My therapist said that intrusive thoughts and images are an extremely common neurological phenomenon. To stop them, I simply needed to retrain my mind; he told me that it is not only possible to rewire the brain’s neural pathways, it is easy. Plasticity is exactly what our brains are designed for. Whenever the image of the girl intruded, I was supposed to imagine that I was in the checkout at the grocery store. On the belt were different grocery items and each item was a thought, and the girl was just one of these thoughts, and I knew which items were healthy and which were not, and I could choose which ones I picked up and which ones I put down, and I could watch these unhealthy thoughts travel away down the checkout belt of my mind. I just had to put her down and pick up something else. I spent hours putting down the girl and picking up yogurt, avocados, blueberries. But the longer I spent there, the more I tried not to see her, the more I saw her. The light blue polish on her nails. Her hair swirling upward in the water.

Eventually, I decided my only choice was to accept her into my life. I still see her, but when I do, I just … say hi to her. I call her by her name. Hey there, Ali. I tell her I like her nail polish. It is not okay, and I don’t think it ever will be. But I have found that this way, I can turn her from a body into a girl. And I feel damned proud that I was able to find my own solution when all these supposed experts couldn’t help me.

I’ve been thinking about going back to school to become a licensed mental health counselor. Wouldn’t that be a second act nobody expected from me? But actually, I’ve always wanted to help people. You want to know the real thing the men I dated had in common? It wasn’t that they were celebrities. It was that they were broken, broken dudes. He was the most broken of them all. Ironic, isn’t it? I made him go to that waterfall because I thought it would heal him, but instead I think it’s the thing that broke him for good.

GHOSTS

IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. Clive has experienced several periods like this since he arrived in New York nearly two decades ago, seasons of paranoia when the girl is in the wind, when even the hiss of the radiator is full of her fury. It lasts a few days, sometimes as long as several weeks, but eventually things go back to normal. Each time it passes he thinks it will be the last time. It is over, dealt with. But it never is, is it? The old fears, the old voices—we have found you, we know, everybody knows—stay dormant for months, years, and then, sure as the tides, they come back.

The littlest thing can set it off. A girl rolling her eyes at her mother in the backseat of his taxi. A whiff of artificial strawberry. During that terrible episode with Sachin, all those years ago, the trigger was nothing more than the hostility with which Sachin looked at him, which made Clive certain that, somehow, Sachin knew. This time, it is even smaller than that, a silly mistake. He thought he heard the name that is no longer his, and now she is everywhere. She haunts him, a ghost skulking at the edges of his vision. She shape-shifts, appearing in the form of other people. She is a girl in an NYU sweatshirt on a delayed subway train, beautifully bored. She is on his block in a pleated charter-school skirt, bathing in the adoration of the boys around her, thrusting out her chin just so. She flashes out from their eyes and catches him in her gaze.

During these intervals, nothing can quell her presence, not his walks, not prayer, for she is inside of him, too, a second self; she feels the freezing floors of his apartment beneath his socked feet, hears a customer berate him over the traffic on the FDR, sees him urinating into a Dasani bottle mid-shift. She reaps pleasure from each small indignity. It seems to him that this life is her doing. She has strung it together, just so. And he feels an anger at her that will never, ever be spent. Then he wonders what it says about him that he has made her into such a vindictive, punishing ghost.

At night she peers into his dreams. He is with Edwin, surrounded by everyone they know; the people shout and leer and hiss. We have found you, we know, everybody knows. Alison looks on from the edge of the crowd, strokes her scar, and smiles.

Old memories come unburied: Dancing with her, kissing her. The twisted string of blue fabric with which her shirt was tied around her neck. The first day he saw her walking down the beach, her stride so nonchalant he knew straightaway she’d be trouble.

Like any ghost, she radiates. She is not content to remain within her own moment. She inhabits them all—not only her aftermath, but also the time before he even knew she existed, until every memory, no matter how sweet, turns bitter on his tongue.