“Not now,” she begs softly. “Not here.” In the next instant, though, her attention shifts. Focusing past me, she gives the tiniest shiver before breaking into an uneasy smile.

“Hey,” Margo says, coming up by my side. She isn’t suspicious, just curious.

“Margo, this is my friend Chrissie, from New York,” I say as casually as possible, but here is another thought. These two never met in the city, and through no fault of mine. When my sisters were coming to town, I repeatedly invited Chrissie to join us. I even appealed to her therapist-other by saying that if she met Margo and Anne, she could understand me better. But either she had to work or Kian was sick or Dante wanted to spend the weekend at the Jersey shore.

Now I see why she was evasive. She feared Margo would recognize her, which lends credence to the fact that she’s known for a while that she was hiding a very, very important fact from me. I want to know why, and I want to know now.

To Margo, I say, “Can Joy ride back to the house with you, so Chrissie and I can talk?”

“But I want to stay,” Joy argues. She senses something is up. Of course, she does.

Margo puts a possessive arm around her shoulders, gutting the protest, and gives Chrissie a warm smile. “Mal has mentioned you so often I feel like I know you. Thank you for coming.”

I feel like I know you. How ironic is that, and Margo not even connecting Chrissie to Tina? Not that the lack of recognition is surprising. Margo is two years older than me, meaning five years older than Chrissie, which is a huge span in school, and Chrissie has changed a lot—at least, I think she has.

My memories of Tina Aiello are vague. I recall a girl who was dark-haired and pudgy, who was smart but shy and wore tee shirts and jeans to fit into the crowd. My Chrissie struggles with body image issues. We’ve discussed it many times. She still carries extra weight on her hips, but you’d never know it from her chic way with tunics and long blazers. As for being shy, the woman who struck up a conversation with me seven years ago on an adjacent stair climber at the gym wasn’t shy. She was confident—and friendly and interesting and fun, all of which raises the horrendous thought that it was all a carefully-conceived plot—that she’d known exactly who I was—that she had deliberately chosen that particular stair climber—that she had been stalking me.