She didn’t. She would always feel funny about spending Arthur’s money—that’s what it was to her, Arthur’s. The quarterly earnings statements felt like hauntings. She mostly reinvested the dividends, and only spent her earnings on things she believed Arthur would approve of: her education, Mitch’s business, Violet’s private school. The initial stock had split like an atom in a nuclear reactor, and she’d used some of the money to diversify her portfolio. Now she sits on a mountain of money. She doesn’t need to work at the museum, but she’s stayed on. She likes to work, likes people, and she likes to be on a schedule. Plus, she’s always found that staying busy helps her to forget. She’s only ever wanted to forget, which was why she’s stayed away from Wisconsin. She’s forgotten for so long that she’s almost forgotten how to remember.

Back at home, Sherri’s reflection bounces off just about every surface of the Palm Springs home she shares with Bayard, from the surface of the pool to the sliding patio doors to the gleaming quartz countertops in the kitchen. One full wall of her bedroom is mirrored. She sees herself from every possible angle in her bathroom, where she even has a mirror that she can pull away from the wall and flip this way and that to reveal each pore and wrinkle in horrifying detail.

Ever since Sherri bought her plane ticket to Wisconsin, she’s begun to tear through all of her outfits and consider an assortment of possible versions of herself she might project during her visit to East Troy. Nothing seems right, and she’s suddenly exhausted from a lifetime of constantly turning the volume of her personality up and down and never quite landing on the right setting. She’s on day four of a strict five-day mail-order cleansing kit that she discovered on Instagram, featuring all kinds of horrible powders she blends into neon-colored smoothies that turn her gut into a cement mixer. Bayard says her skin has started to smell like burning plastic.