The details were slippery, impossible to get a firm grip on. I felt like I was creating a story from scratch. It was a story that made sense, based on the pieces left behind.

But Thursday night felt like an entirely different lifetime.

It was getting harder and harder to pull the events surrounding Friday night into focus, even. Like, as with twenty years ago, something too large to process had happened, and the connection in my memory had snapped and twisted, and nothing looked the same anymore.

I was living clearly in the after, now. After Sean’s body had been found at the edge of my property. After the past had found me again.

These were the facts: Bennett had bought enough food for two but left abruptly the previous afternoon; and Elyse had never stopped at my house on her way in to work, like she’d told Bennett she would.

This was how it started.

Ten years ago, when the old interviews aired, there were the classmates and teachers who got closer, who wanted me to confide; who wanted to be part of the story, always willing to spin a new piece of gossip after. People who saw me as a conquest. Like something to be dissected and studied.

There was the other side, too. People who didn’t like that they’d missed something, who wanted to be the center of their own story; people who left, either abruptly or slowly. But the result was the same, and I could see the signs coming this time.

The facts made things bad enough; media attention would make it worse.

I blamed the media attention of ten years earlier for pushing my mother into a perilous descent. During the first handful of years after the accident, she was able to feign normalcy. Even though she wasn’t sleeping, not when she was supposed to. The lingering effects of trauma, in hindsight: how she’d check in on me every hour, every thirty minutes, every ten. Overinvolved in every activity, every interaction. Unable to still her mind from the worry of whether it might happen again.

The case made all of us, and then it unmade us.

My mother was tragic until she was neglectful. Tossed to the media with no training. Given money for her story and then torn apart for the very same tale years later. She was dissected, piece by piece, in articles and interviews and think pieces. And she dulled it with the most readily available remedy.

The only people who showed up for her were the ones who wanted something from her in return: a piece of the story or the money. An old boyfriend named Nick Valdene, who’d been in and out of our life since before the accident, and who, from the way they talked, may or may not have been my father. I hoped not, but it didn’t matter. He was gone again by the time she’d written a check to pay off his debts. And then new boyfriends, new friends, the wrong type; the very wrong type.

After the ten-year anniversary, and her talk-show appearance, the renewed attention, people started making contact of every kind. The calls began. The letters started coming. Every single kind, and you didn’t know which until you opened it. Messages on the answering machine, wanting to know how we’d put the money to use. The real question, implied underneath, was of course this: How had we put my miraculous survival to use? Was I worth it?

They wanted to see it, the physical manifestations of their generosity and hope.

They came from far away and close to home. High school was a minefield.

Around that time, I became something else: the girl who got attention. Who wouldn’t give interviews. Who wasn’t grateful enough. Who forgot where she had come from.

Who was still, years later, trying to escape.

We had to leave. My mother didn’t like it, either. Didn’t like the version of her reflected in their questions. In the things they would see in her answers. It was happening to both of us, this dismantling of our lives.

When we moved to Ohio and I registered at the new school, I started going by my middle name. Some people knew, but few people cared. It was a thing my new classmates couldn’t really remember, either. By the time I enrolled in college, I’d made it official, changing my last name as well. Believing that the only way to escape was to become someone new.

By this point, Arden Maynor was as much a mystery to me as she was to anyone else.

Luckily, most of the original donated funds were tied up in a trust to be accessed for college. Though my mother bled through the money from her appearances and book advance, she couldn’t touch that. The fund paid for my education, including my master’s, and supported me while I was in school. And the fund financed a big chunk of this very house.

I didn’t know whether it was an act of supreme cruelty or bravery that I turned her down when the trust transferred to my possession. It was the last I saw of my mother, the last I heard of her. And I hated that this was the image that remained: that too-skinny person, fidgeting, biting the side of her thumb, looking nervously over her shoulder. Another possible version of me.

Maybe I did feel like I needed to earn it, for all the people who helped us.

I thought I had made good choices with the money: anonymity and a fresh start, and that wasn’t nothing.

But now that was in danger. I could see it coming, that slide, threatening to bring me back to the start.

I CALLED ELYSE. I had made a mistake in keeping this from Bennett. I might not have known her as well, or for as long, but she had made herself a part of my daily life; she had confided in me about her accident, what had brought her to this field. I had to be the one to share the news, not let her find out like Bennett had, tainted with the feeling of betrayal. I wanted her to understand, and to understand the need to keep it quiet.

I hoped Bennett hadn’t called her to warn her, in a sudden shifting of allegiance.

That was the problem with the start of any story. You had to get ahead of it.

Her phone kept ringing until voicemail picked up, with her trademark perky tone: You’ve reached Elyse! Leave a message! Every statement Elyse made seemed to be punctuated by an exclamation point, or a comma, or an ellipsis as she left her thoughts midsentence, drifting, waiting for you to pick them up and continue.

“Hey, it’s Liv. Please give me a call when you get a chance.”

I checked the time. I could catch her in person before she left the hospital if I hurried.

I HEARD SOMEONE COMING before I reached my car, and I gripped my keys in my hand—how I used to prepare myself in college, the first time away from home, the points jutting out between the fingers of my fist, like there was danger lurking around every potential corner.

People following, people watching and waiting until I was alone.

But when I spun, it was just Rick, hands in the air, fingers faintly trembling. “It’s me. It’s just me.” He didn’t move any closer. My eyes drifted to the yellow tape caught in the bushes between our yards.

“Sorry,” I said, lowering my hand.

“Well, I was just coming to catch up, to talk about . . . You’ve had company, and then I figured you were sleeping, so I didn’t want to call and wake you.”

He was watching for me, though. How easily could he see what went on here from his house? There were trees and bushes between us, but I could see the glow of a window when he was awake. Rick fidgeted on his feet. And I wasn’t sure whether the thing that was stressing him was the body in his yard or what the detective might’ve told me. What he might’ve done.

“I have to run out. Do you need anything?” I asked. I often brought him what he needed. Like he’d told Detective Rigby, we looked out for each other.