“Did you ever check her phone?” I asked, only realizing how accusatory I sounded after the words left my mouth.

“At first we did every day, but there was never anything but calls and texts to us and a couple of friends. Most of the kids her age didn’t have a phone yet.” Zach paused, looked away. “But we’d trailed off the last few months. Neither one of us can remember the last time we read through her texts.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered,” I told him, because he seemed to be waiting for some kind of reassurance. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with what happened.”

Zach nodded, but it was the kind of perfunctory acknowledgment that meant he didn’t believe a word I was saying. That was okay; I didn’t believe it, either. “It still doesn’t seem real,” Zach continued. “That they’re both gone.” He tried to catch my eye, but I looked away. “I keep waiting for them to walk into the kitchen, demanding snacks. Sometimes I swear I can hear them giggling from Izzy’s room late at night.” He blinked fast, tightened his jaw. “I check Izzy’s bed in the morning to see if she might be there. I know it’s stupid, but every day I think maybe she will be.”

I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me. We shared a loss, but I didn’t know Zach Logan, not really. We weren’t friends. We were barely acquaintances. And unlike him, I understood, down to the marrow of my bones, that my daughter was gone. Now I had one more thing to envy.

• • •

I’d avoided the park since Junie’s death, made sure I went the long way to the grocery store or gas station. But after I left Zach in the frozen food aisle and got back in my car without buying anything, I found myself taking a left on Elm and gliding to a stop at the park. It was empty, yellow crime scene tape tied around a tree at the edge of the playground, the other end loose and flapping in the breeze. I got out of the car, made my way across the scrubby grass to the mouth of the cement tunnel where my daughter had died. There was a dark patch in the dirt, a stain that might have been blood soaked into the earth. I put out a hand, steadied myself on the rough surface of the tunnel.

“I had the same reaction,” a voice said, and I whipped my head up, saw Jenny Logan sitting on a picnic table to my right, feet resting on the bench. “But then I told myself it wasn’t blood.”

“Did that help?” I managed.

She shrugged. “Does anything?” She patted the table next to her hip. “You may want to come sit down. You’re looking a little green around the gills.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d think the Logans were following me around, inserting their lives, their grief, into mine. But I wasn’t that convinced of my own importance. This was just a small place, everyone bumping up against each other. I crossed to the picnic table and hoisted myself up, the spring chill of the wood worming its way through my jeans into my skin. “I saw your husband at the Piggly Wiggly a few minutes ago.”