And if only … if only they hadn’t taken her out with them. If only they hadn’t been taking pretty white daughters out with them for months like the world was a place it most definitely wasn’t. If only he had gone after her when she ran. If only he’d called out to her. “Wait, don’t go,” and maybe he wouldn’t be sitting here now, with his hands numb and the snow falling on his coat.

“But I never would have. He told me to let her go and I did.” He put his head in his hands.

“You couldn’t have known,” I whispered. I placed a hand on his back, but he jerked away from my touch. He stood and brushed the snow from his windbreaker.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“You can’t just leave! There’s so much more I want to ask you. I know there must be more you want to ask me, too. We can be open with each other now. We don’t have to hide.”

“You wanted the truth and now you have it. What more could you want from me?”

I understood then what I did want, what I had wanted for months. There was a version of this story in which two lost souls whose lives had been irrevocably altered by the same long-ago night found each other in New York and, in one of those unexpected turns you hear about with surprising frequency, built a new life together. It was the best version of the story, one with the power to salvage everything that had happened. At the same moment it became clear to me that this was what could have happened, I also understood that it would not happen, and that from then on I would be living in a different aftermath—no longer the aftermath of Alison’s death, but of this winter in New York with Clive Richardson. For, whether we’re aware of it or not, we are always living in the aftermath of something.

“It has to mean something that I got into your cab. Don’t you see? All of this was supposed to happen. Please,” I said uselessly.

He looked up at the sky and shook his head. “The crazy thing is I knew. I must have, right? That something with you wasn’t … You just seemed so lost and lonely.”

“I am lost. I am lonely. Clive, please. It’s still me. I was just a little girl.” My eyes filled with tears.

For a moment, as he looked at me, he seemed to be peering into the past, seeing the strange sunburned child I once was. He nodded. “I know.” Then he slipped the wool hat from his head and stuffed it in the pocket of his coat. “Goodbye, Claire.”

He walked down the street and disappeared into the falling snow.

FOR WEEKS after that I circled the Little Sweet hoping to find him. Maybe we could reconcile. Maybe it wasn’t too late. But he never came back.

One night when I was walking past, Vincia spotted me. She left her post behind the counter and came outside.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

She nodded. I expected her to be angry. Instead her expression was sharp with loss. It occurred to me that I might have misapprehended her prickliness toward me; maybe Vincia had harbored her own ideas about two lonely people in this city who might have found happiness together. “I heard he left in the middle of the night.”

“Where did he go?”

“As if I would tell you if I knew!” She turned and marched quickly back inside.

I suppose that in the days before he confronted me, Clive must have been settling his affairs in New York and making plans for wherever he was heading to begin again once more. I stopped returning to the Little Sweet after that. It was as Clive had said: I’d wanted the truth and now I had it, as much of it as I would ever have. It was enough, wasn’t it? There are many versions of the Alison Thomas story and I suspect there always will be. The police have theirs. So do the interweb conspiracy theorists and Dying for Fun. Now I had my own. One I could accept. One I could, perhaps, move on from.

ALISON WAKES from her stupor on the cliffs to the sounds of lovemaking. She turns and sees them, these men for whom she has performed her spectacular self all week.

What the fuck you staring at, little girl?

Suddenly she feels very young and very foolish. How impressed she had been with herself! How pleased their approval had made her and how convinced she was of her appeal to them. How clearly she had seen it: she would get their groans of pleasure, their black skin against her white skin, the night a souvenir to remind her who she has the capacity to be. How humiliated she is to realize this night isn’t about her and it never was, to see Edwin and Clive together beneath the stars and to know with corrosive, painful clarity that there is not a thing in her own life as true as this moment between them.

She gathers herself up and she runs, sandals in her hands, through the scrub. When at last she breaks through to Mayfair Road, she continues to run along the ditch on the road’s shoulder, not caring how the rocks cut her feet, wanting it, even. Up ahead, she sees the lights of Indigo Bay. The illuminated fountains and the perfect lines of palms. She smells the floral air, feels the road turn smooth and loving beneath her feet. And then?

Some months after my last night with Clive Richardson, a package arrived from Philadelphia, a slender bubble mailer addressed to Claire Thomas.

I’m sorry it’s taken me such a ridiculously long time to send this to you. I hope it’s helpful. Sending you all my best.

Inside was a color copy of a poster for the Princeton Modern Dance Ensemble’s “Winter Extravaganza.” Polaroids from parties. Messages scrawled on scraps of notebook paper: “12:15, just left for dining hall. C u there?” “Free ice cream at student center tonight. Let’s do this!” A postcard. On the front, a consummate sunset, lilac infinity over a tropical sea. On the back:

Nika Nika,

Greetings from paradise! Haha, not exactly. Hope your parents aren’t driving you as crazy as mine are. On the bright side, I met the cutest boy. Guess we’ll see!

Love ya,

A

Where does she turn after everything with Clive and Edwin falls apart? Isn’t it obvious? She finds him doing tequila shots as “Redemption Song” is piped in over the speakers, or sipping a Red Stripe on a lounge chair by the pool, or participating in a game of beer pong on the Ping-Pong table off the lobby, his enthusiasm changing to cool boredom the instant he spots her. Better than nothing, she tells herself. Even before it’s over she knows it isn’t enough, not even close. It is worse than nothing. It is all wrong. This boy whose baby-blue eyes match his baby-blue polo shirt match her baby-blue manicure. It only makes her feel more acutely the exact problem of her life: No matter what she does, no matter how she tries, she cannot get out beyond herself. She can only ever be Alison.

But suppose you told her she could have a different life, swap out hers for one she’d deem more acceptable as an offering to this beautiful, brutal world? Though it would be pretty to think she’d say yes, she knows what she would really do: She would snatch up her cute dresses, her A’s, her orthodontia-sleeked teeth, the many dappled lawns of her life … the gothic dormitory washed in eventide bells, flip-flops in autumn, fresh powder on the mountain. She would take it all and she would run. There it is, her most shameful secret: She loves her life. Oh, how she loves it.

It is very late now, and she is desperate for something, anything, with which to salvage this night, this vacation that has gone so awry from her carefully cultivated plans. It’s then that she looks out into the water and sees Faraway, a black silhouette etched against the sky. She hears the soft wash of waves. She walks across the beach to the water’s edge. She unties her halter top, unzips her skirt, shimmies out of her panties, and lets them fall to the sand at her feet. She considers moving her clothes higher up the beach in case the tide should rise and carry them away. Instead, she leaves them. Let the sea do what it will. What a story it would be, what a thing to be able to remember. She steps into the water.

Maybe, as she strokes through the sea to the cay, she believes she is being lured there by a black-haired woman with hooves for feet who has chosen her, and into whose wildness she can finally lose this self she loves and hates in equal measure. Or maybe she does not believe any of that. Maybe her strokes are powered by a desire she can’t name, a need going unmet and unmet and unmet. Maybe she simply wants to give herself her wildest wild night; proof, to some older, duller version of herself, that she was young once and didn’t squander it.

She follows the starlit path inland, her feet sensing their way over roots and rocks. In the darkness, the spray cast off by the waterfall is a vaporous fog, soft as a caress on her skin. Maybe she slips on the moss-slicked rocks close to the water and falls in. Maybe she dives, the water appearing deeper than it really is in the dark, and hits her head. This version, too, has its blank spaces. Things I’ll never be able to know. These are the secret moments. Hers alone.

BUT FIRST …

In the dead of night, a little girl opens her eyes. As she surfaces from dreams, she smells the tang of blood. She has been scratching in her sleep. Then she hears rustling. She calls her sister’s name and her sister comes to her.

“Where were you?” she asks.