Younger Odilie is different. And I don’t mean in the ten-year-age-difference kind of way. She’s not the woman I saw glimpses of in photographs at his house, or online after her death—or even later in her feed. Her nose is wider, her lips thinner, her eyes hooded and rounder, her body much softer. When I squint, I can recognize her, somewhere in the depths of her old face. But if this wasn’t her profile, I would never have known it was her.

The pictures of her are chaste. She has limp hair and no style. “Cheap prep” is what I would call it if I wanted to be cruel—Aéropostale polos, poorly fitted jeans—and she hunches in on herself, like she’s not quite sure how to fit her body into space, like she wants to make herself smaller.

She grew up in Wyneck, a coastal town not far from New York City that is known for its wealthy summer residents, which I first learned only because of a throwaway line Tom said to me, about Wyneck and how much he hated it, hated having to go there and navigate the social scene, hated the sweat that collected under his shirt from the reverse-chic lack of central AC. Later, her parents moved to Michigan.

I let myself wonder, briefly, how he met her. If, eventually, she moved up to New York and found him there. If their worlds collided earlier than that, in Wyneck. I wonder if I’ll be able to map it, if there will be an indicator of when they got into a relationship, when they got engaged. I’m sure there will be because what else is Instagram for?

One New Year’s Eve, Odilie posts a very poor photo of fireworks. “Who wants to be my New Year’s kiss?” It’s cheekier, much more provocative than most of her captions, and I wonder if she was drunk when she wrote it, why she didn’t delete it the next morning, what kind of message she’s left by letting it linger there. There are a few comments, a couple by men who want Odilie to “find them in the New Year.” Nothing from Tom, though. That chapter of her life hasn’t started yet and I wonder when it will.

At 2:00 a.m. I finally place my phone down, my temples aching from staring at a screen for hours on end. And in that moment, in the darkness of my room, it floods back to me what I’ve been doing, whose life I’ve been meticulously combing through for the past few hours. I shut my eyes and lie down.

Why am I doing this? What do I gain from reliving the life of a woman who is dead? How could this possibly help get my life back on track? I turn toward the window, where my empty wineglass sits on the sill.