Death is never easy to explain. When their cat went missing in Georgia, she told the kids she was sure he had found a new home. “Of course he did. Who wouldn’t want that sweet little kitty cat? Or he might come right back here,” she had told Jason. “Cats do that all the time.”

“Why do you tell such lies?” Brent had asked, certain the cat was long gone. “Coyote chow,” he said. But she said the cat was lost, missing—missing like the piece of luggage she once lost. She owned so little, and then that, too, was gone, and maybe that is why this trial is so important to her. She is a lot like that young woman who was murdered, one of the people who could so easily be lifted from the Earth with barely a footnote—pass the gravy, please.

Shelley never got her luggage back, left on a Greyhound bus, and yet she has never stopped thinking about the life of her things; she likes to think they were found by someone homeless, the fancy nightgown she loved—nylon, but it felt like silk—finding a home with someone who, like her, had never had something so impractical, the scent of fabric softener and the sachets she kept with it giving an added sense of comfort. The same with her favorite sweater, its fibers carrying her smell onto the body of the person who found it. To them, her loss was their luck, a stroke of good fortune, the sort of thing that might help change an attitude or turn a life around. To think otherwise, to think of her things pissed on or burned, bloodied beyond recognition, was too painful to even imagine, as was picturing the slender calico running for her life, ears tucked back and a guttural scream emitted with the swift tear of a coyote or the speeding tire of a car. Shelley’s eye is always drawn to the side of the road—so much loss there in the ditches and wooded areas.

Brent had said it was over and he was going his own way.

What about us? she wanted to ask, but she didn’t. Her brother had told her, “Don’t ever beg, Shelley.” But now she’s thinking she might have to beg a little to keep her job. He would probably say that in this case, begging might be a good thing.