Ayanna scratched her nose and eyebrow, didn’t let her eyes focus on the screen. Every day for two years, she pingponged between anger and denial and depression and bargaining. Everyone kept acting like one day she would wake up having ascended to acceptance, a beautiful new life, where yes, her sister had died, but it was only trivia rather than a wound. There was no point any longer in pretending she wasn’t interested in what the spirits were saying. None of these things would undo everything that had happened. For two years, her grandma and therapist kept saying “You have to move forward.” They said variations on “Healing only comes through living.” She read the results. There were six Marlie Evans that immediately came up on the search. The one who seemed the most likely to have a ghost looking for her was an eighty-two-year-old who lived in the same city as Ayanna. The first hit for her was about her long-running book club. Over the summer, she had celebrated forty years of bringing Black women together to read. Ayanna laughed when she realized the author at the featured event was the creative writing professor. They were celebrating the release of her third novel, which was about a Black woman who was an assistant professor and a writer trying to date in a college town while dealing with racial trauma and not getting paid enough for her previous books.

“Big imagination,” Ayanna muttered, then felt a little guilty reading how kindly Marlie Evans had welcomed the writer, how earnestly she believed that all Black books mattered because Black Americans were developing a cultural heritage in a nation still hostile to the idea that there were many different ways of being American, and how reading was one of the most remarkable things of being human. She had been a schoolteacher.

Tired and knowing she would overthink it in the morning, Ayanna wrote two emails. One, first, to the professor, asking if she would be willing to introduce her to Marlie Evans. And the second to the book club’s email address where she first wrote a long, rambling message about Valerie, the visitations, the way that Valerie was still obsessed with Marlie and wanted her to know she had never meant to leave her, then realized if Marlie was anything like either of her grandmas, she would think Ayanna was an insane person and never respond to that message. So, she backtracked, deleted the email, and wrote an email about her interest in the book club, which was true, and asked if they were taking on new members.