The caption read, “Junior Miss Massachusetts was the height of my pageant career with a first runner-up finish. The winner was able to complete all of her duties and fulfill all of her obligations and so I remained a non-winner.”

Intrigued, she turned to the next photo. Linda looked perhaps a year or two older and was clad in a long silky sheath dress and a sash that proclaimed her “Miss Suffolk County.” Linda’s allusion to time in doctor’s offices, to needing “fixing”—had that been to be a beauty queen?

The caption was so bizarre she had to read it twice. “Though I was again crowned Miss Suffolk County, the state pageant was a complete rout when I didn’t even qualify for the finals. The next day I realized that my mother was tainting my food and had been for some time.”

Stunned, Marissa turned to the next page. Linda, at nineteen, looking gaunt and foreign with her hair shorn, had no smile. “My mother took this photo when I was being transferred from the emergency room that treated my cough syrup, wine and valium cocktail to the mental hospital where I would be treated for anorexia, a condition I did not have.”

Marissa’s heart seemed to be missing beats. She flipped through the remaining photographs and they were all the Linda she knew. Whether a too-grown-up little girl’s body, a waiflike anguished young woman or the stronger, more familiar form of a Yale coed, Linda was there. Marissa looked back at the second photo and made herself reread the words, “ . . . My mother was tainting my food and had been for some time.”

She wanted not to believe it, the way she hadn’t wanted to believe a mother would drown all of her children or a father shoot his entire family. Monsters wore white sheets and hid in the shadows. Monsters weren’t real, she wanted to believe with all her heart.

Except they were. Sometimes they wore a religious smock or a banker’s suit. Sometimes they looked like the best father in the world and walked around free in the sunshine. Linda had been raised by a monster.

Her heart was breaking again, in a different way. She looked at the little girl one last time and turned to the front pages to confront the opening words.

“There was a night, not long ago, when I experienced moments of complete happiness. When every instinct in my body told me to run away from this happiness I knew there was something wrong, deep within me. I did run away from happiness because I wanted it for all the wrong reasons.”

“Marissa, whatever is it?”

She gasped and realized she was still at work and that tears were running down her face. “Sorry, Heather. A sad book. Silly, huh?” She whisked a tissue out of the box and dabbed the corners of her eyes. “I’m going to make a ruin of my makeup.”

“Must be some book.”

“Yeah, it is. So you caught me, reading on the job.”