“Back again,” he said.

“You caught me. I think I’m officially hooked. May I?” I gestured shyly at the empty chair across from him.

My request flustered him. But I figured he wouldn’t be so rude as to say no, and I was right.

“Please.”

In the weeks that followed, I went to the Little Sweet many times. Each time I feigned sheepishness when I asked to join Clive, and each time he said yes. I grew quite adept at playing the role I had created for myself, that of a lonely exile in New York, a girl from far away, all alone. While Clive did not exactly seem to welcome my presence, it seemed to me that, gradually, he was warming to me, or perhaps I should say to Emily.

What did we talk about? We traded stories from work—a boorish passenger, a temperamental author. We commiserated over the various urban creatures making incursions into our apartments—silverfish in my shower, mice in his ceiling. I told him about my short-lived kickball career, and he told me he’d played in a cricket league until a shoulder injury a few years earlier sidelined him. But mostly, as New Yorkers are wont to, we talked about the city itself, which provided for us a language of common approval and disdain: De Blasio’s carriage horse crusade—a lost cause. The MTA—abysmal. Pedicabs—a nuisance.

I told stories composed of inventions and half-truths about a childhood in flyover country, hoping that these confessions would elicit some from Clive in return. I would try—carefully, so carefully—to ask questions that might lead to a revelation of some kind. Did he plan to go home someday? Did he miss his family? What was he like as a child? Nothing. Often, I caught him telling small lies. For instance, take this exchange, from our third night together:

“Have you been driving a taxi since you moved to New York?”

“Yes. Though I only switched to the day shift a few years ago.”

“I hope you won’t think this is weird, but I looked up the island you’re from online. It looks, like, ridiculously beautiful.”

“Yes, it was quite beautiful.”

“What’s it like, like, living in a tourist destination?”

“New York is also a tourist destination.”

“I guess that’s true. Did you drive a taxi down there, too?”

“No.”

“What did you do?”

“Odd jobs, mostly.”

ANOTHER EXAMPLE, from a few weeks later:

“How was your day?”

“The traffic was terrible.”

“This time of year must be the worst, huh, with the holidays coming?”

“There’s always something. In spring, it’s the parades. In fall, it’s the UN summit. The tourists are quite bad now. Today I picked up a family at St. Patrick’s that barely spoke English. They asked me to take them to Rockefeller Center. I tried to tell them it’s just around the corner, but the mother kept saying, ‘Skating! Skating!’ Finally I just drove them there.”

“I haven’t been skating since I moved here.”

“I’ve never been.”

“Really?”

“We didn’t have a lot of ice growing up, miss.”

“Right, I’m sorry. That was stupid. We used to skate all winter long, as soon as the Wabash froze over. I remember my feet would turn so numb that when I took off my skates I’d cry.” (Truths nested in lies nested in truths. The pain of numb toes warming after skating—a memory as visceral as any from my childhood. But the Wabash River? A strip of blue cellophane in my fourth-grade diorama.) “All the kids from my neighborhood would be playing some game together on the ice, and I was always just skating by myself off to the side. It was like I couldn’t figure it out somehow. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever really had a best friend?”

“Me, neither.”

TONIGHT WAS my senior dance recital. I’ve been practicing for months. I choreographed the dance myself. I probably spent a hundred hours practicing. But as soon as I stepped onto the stage and went up for my first pirouette, I knew I would fall short. It was like it had already happened and there was nothing I could do about it.

I danced and it was fine. I didn’t mess up or anything, but I wasn’t inside the music the way I wanted to be. When the recital was over I put on my sweats and went out to the lobby and there’s twenty people giving me flowers and accosting me with praise. “Oh my god, Alison, you’re so amazing.” “You’re so talented.” “That was so great.” Blah blah blah fanfuckingtastic.

Are most people so insensitive to what’s going on that it all looks the same to them? I mean, how did everybody totally miss what actually happened tonight? I didn’t make a single mistake, not one, and I still completely failed.

Flowers and white teeth. This was my image of my sister, taken from this very recital. She had seemed to float with happiness that night. What a shock to learn that she had in fact been seething with self-criticism and hostility. How well she had hidden it! I had not thought my sister capable of such deep dissatisfaction.

I FLEW to Pasadena for Thanksgiving. I resented this disruption to the progress I was making with Clive, but could see no way around it. It was the same small gathering as always: me, my parents, Aunt Caroline, and a man my mother referred to, in a tone that managed to sound simultaneously empty of and loaded with judgment, as “the flavor of the month.” This time he was an acupuncturist of Argentine extraction. Aunt Caroline was in her mid-sixties and skinnier than ever, her lips plumped to the edge of tastefulness with Restylane. The acupuncturist looked to be about forty-five. Aunt Caroline had been dating forty-five-year-old men since she was twenty and it seemed she had no plans of stopping now.

Before the meal we assumed our usual positions, my mother and me in the kitchen, Aunt Caroline, the boyfriend, and my father chatting in the living room. (“I promise I’ll stay out from underfoot,” Aunt Caroline said to my mother, as if she were doing her a favor by sitting on the couch getting tipsy on Cab Franc.) At the dinner table, things proceeded the same as always.

“The garden is looking magnificent. What’s your secret?” Aunt Caroline asked my father, who launched into an animated discourse on his approaches to fertilizing, pruning, watering, pest control.

“And what’s new with you, darling?” Aunt Caroline asked, leaning toward me.

Before I even had time to concoct a convincing reply, my father chimed in. “Em’s getting into yoga.”

“How fabulous!” Aunt Caroline said. “I have a friend who swears she grew two inches when she started practicing yoga.”

“It’s fantastic for your alignment,” my father said. “And it transforms the way your body processes carbon dioxide.”

“Is that right?” my mother asked.

“NPR,” my father shrugged.

The conversation moved on to other subjects—the California proposition that had just passed overwhelmingly, the consulting project my father had picked up in his retirement, the dash of fish sauce my mother had added to the roasted Brussels sprouts this year, the half marathon in Huntington Beach my father had registered for and the nagging knee injury that would likely prevent him from running it.

As the meal progressed, its mundanity began to feel increasingly phantasmagoric. How was it possible they didn’t realize something was happening to me? The conversation continued—my mother couldn’t take this new contingent that had joined her book club, they never read the books, she was honestly considering defecting. I clenched my fists under the table, digging my fingernails into my palms. This, I now saw, was exactly how our family had maintained itself since Alison’s death, by not squinting too closely at one another, not knowing one another too well.

As soon as we’d finished the pie, I announced that I was feeling terribly jet-lagged and headed to bed early, though I lay awake much of the night, staring out the window at my father’s violets, which held perfectly still in the dry, windless dark.

ON SATURDAY morning I woke up early. Aunt Caroline and her boyfriend had flown home the night before. My flight to JFK wasn’t until the afternoon. I found my mother in the kitchen.

“Coffee?” she asked, already opening the cabinet and reaching for a mug.

“No.”

“Oh. Tea? Orange juice?”

I shook my head.

“How about some breakfast? I can make eggs?”

“Stop, Mom. I don’t want anything.”

I went to the dishwasher and began unloading the bowls.

She put a hand on my shoulder. “You spoil me.”

I shrugged her off. She winced and shrank back from me with a wounded expression. Suddenly I felt nothing but revulsion for this fragile bird of a woman, my mother. I wanted to hurt her, and not like I just had, not with some minor daughterly rudeness, but to really hurt her, in a way she could not evade or dismiss.

“Do you remember Alison’s last dance recital?” I asked.

She looked down at the floor. As a family, we were not in the habit of bringing up Alison without warning. I kept going. “The one where she danced to—”