“Has she ever defended it from a lunatic with a gun?”

In the end Alison said yes. It was arranged that we would stay in the home of Philippa, an educator I’d met years ago at a conference. Once the interview contacts had been made and the flights booked, I felt as though some brake had been released and the train I was on was lurching slowly forward. Robin and I started making love again early in the morning when we were only half-awake. It hurt me to see the leap of surprise in his eyes when I reached for him, to hear the softness in his voice when we lay together. Did I give myself away? Could he tell that in the part of me that was not already occupied by Maddy, I was hollowing out a space for someone else?

As November approached, I took the encounters that came my way as signs.

While driving near the high school I spotted Fiona and Vicky on the sidewalk with a girl I didn’t know. Fiona was balanced on one leg demonstrating a ballet position, her pale hair curved around her face in a new way. She wobbled and fell theatrically into the arms of the other girl, and Vicky raised her head from her phone at the right moment to laugh.

Fiona had always been my favorite of Maddy’s friends, an imp as a child, tart and quirky as she grew. Vicky’s more self-sufficient bearing came, I thought, from her large Italian family: she didn’t need any more adults in her life. Yet it was Vicky who treated me in the most natural way after Maddy died, not distant at all but warm and solicitous and Catholic in her instinct for ritual and ceremony, weeping openly and speaking of Maddy as though she were in another room. The girls came to see me a number of times after the service, and then their visits dropped off, as their visits had dropped off even before Maddy turned them away.

Her refusal had grieved and bewildered them. I tried to soften it, to explain that she was drawing away from everyone and everything. Two days before she died, Fiona and Vicky showed up with a homemade banner—We love you, Maddy!!!—mounted on stakes they insisted on hammering into the lawn under the dining room window. “Do you think she can see it from here?” They conferred, yanked up the sign, rehammered it. I didn’t have the heart to tell them. By that time Maddy was barely conscious.

In the seconds it took to slow down and decide not to stop, I saw them clearly: two young women who would always hold pieces of Maddy, but who had accrued a year of extra life and moved on.