Then, more meals, more landscape shots. The beach at sunset, a boat out on the water, the empty main street of Wyneck before all the summer residents flocked there, like the town is taking one last deep breath.

And then it’s summer and I recognize her.

It’s so sudden a change that I check the date of the photo posted, positive for a moment that I accidentally scrolled too far up. She’s posing alone on the beach, the camera zoomed in on her face, her smile wide, teeth achingly white. The water is stormy behind her, though the sky is a clear blue.

Her lips, stretched into a grin, are what I notice first. They’re plump and pink, almost juicy. She definitely got injections. The rest of her face is made up, her nose contoured, but not necessarily different. It’s a lot closer to the nose she had when she died, but not quite. She clearly had more work done later, got the tip refined.

Her brows are filled out, too, her round eyes more pronounced. I can’t tell if it’s a fox-eye lift or if it’s natural, but they’re artfully shadowed; the shape is finally filling out her face in an alluring way.

But there are other things, too. She’s fresh-faced, dewy even. Gone is the wobbly black eyeliner I’ve seen in most of her pictures. And her hair has highlights and is cut into a severe, shoulder-length bob.

Her body itself is all angles. No softness or roundness around her thighs and face. Her hands are bony, her oversize magenta nails almost clownish against the daintiness of her fingers.

She is still young, about twenty. And there’s something so sickening, so strikingly sad, that she felt such an urge to reconfigure her face and body. The cosmetic surgery, the makeover, that I can understand. But her poor body looks sharp, her skin draped over jutting bones where there once were curves.

She looks like herself, though, much more like herself. If herself is the one splashed on the cover of the Post, on the nightly news, in a retweet comparing our faces. As if looking at her cherished, overrefined face next to mine would somehow make me admit to a wrongdoing the world believed me to have committed.

Her eyes, they’re almost vacant, despite the toothy smile. She reminds me, I realize, of the women I grew up with in my hometown, who gave up their careers to raise children and resented it, but actually derived pleasure and meaning from the PTA meetings, the bake offs and Unitarian church services they attended. It’s as if her direction, her goal in life, has taken another course.

But how? When did this happen?