Macey wanted to throw things at him. Unfortunately, telephones did not yet have the capacity for that. “I wasn’t involved,” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Isn’t that your grandparents’ line?”

She wanted nothing except to get off the phone. Pretend she had never made this call. Never heard these words. What had happened to that understanding teacher who told her not to be hard on her mother? “I’m alone,” she said pleadingly, trying to make him understand what it was to be alone.

“You won’t be alone once you start.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know this town.”

“Actually, I know that town pretty well.”

She had forgotten. Nobody knew as thoroughly as Wade Sibley what it was to be alone.

“Your town has enough good guys,” he said. “You’re going to be the first in line, and it’s a scary position, but you can hold it down. Recruit some allies. How about Lindsay and Grace?”

“Are you kidding? They’d just laugh.”

“About what?”

“That any of it matters. That Venita mattered. That she was even a person.”

“Then you should start with them,” said Mr. Sibley.

The man knew nothing. He was decades ago. He did not understand a thing. She would lose her friends. People would not meet her eyes. They would not sit with her. She would be a jerk. She would be alone.

Play with fire, she thought, and get your fingers burned. Who reached into the ashes? I did. It isn’t a grandparent who will get burned. My grandparents and Austin’s—they’ll just stand back from the fire and wait, like they did before. I will get burned.

But Mr. Sibley was saying good-bye, and what he said was, “Godspeed.”

After the night of the photographs, Mom and Dad changed their work hours and got home on the 5:40 instead of the 7:08, so Macey had dinner with her parents on weeknights, which was rare. This lasted two evenings. Then it was back to routines.

Nana phoned. “Darling, Papa will come get you, we’re having rosemary garlic chicken.”

“No, thanks, I’m fine here,” said Macey.

But Papa came anyway, so she was courteous and let Papa hug her, but she was not a little girl with a perfect grandfather. She was a sad young woman hugged by a sad old man.

She found if she sat rather still and kept a stiff posture, like a woman in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype, that Mr. Sibley’s words could be kept at a distance. She was reconstructing the phone call in her mind, taking hold of the nice friendly parts at the beginning and abandoning the hard parts at the close.

Grace had gotten her driver’s license and a seven-year-old Blazer.