She went to Madison Miller’s funeral. She sat in the very back of the church. It was a Wednesday, midmorning, a dreary day. It was a Catholic mass. Sherri had never been to a Catholic funeral. She was unprepared for the fact that the coffin would be front and center the whole time, covered with a cloth, an open Bible, a crucifix. She was unprepared to be looking at the coffin during the service, imagining the lifeless body inside it.

The church was packed, of course. Madison’s mother, unable even to hold herself up, was supported on one side by Madison’s father, and on the other by a man who looked enough like the mother—the same ginger hair and pale eyebrows—that he was probably Madison’s uncle. At one point in the service, as the priest was shaking the incense over the coffin, Madison’s mother let out the loudest, most unearthly wail that Sherri had ever heard.

Was Bobby aware of what happened after that? It got so Sherri couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was out a lot. That helped. But when he was home, if they passed each other, in the kitchen, in the hallway, she found herself turning at a slight angle so that their arms wouldn’t brush up against each other. Did he notice her doing that? Did he notice how she threw all of her focus into Katie, into making sure she didn’t know anything was wrong? They baked a lot. Sherri encouraged Katie to invite friends to sleep over and in the mornings she made pancakes for all of the girls. But the specter of Madison was there, all the time.

Sherri joined a Facebook page devoted to Madison’s memory. She read every single post and every single comment. She drank up details about Madison like a cactus taking in water in the desert. Madison ran the thousand meters in indoor track and the mile outdoors. She was a counselor in training at a summer camp in New Hampshire, where she specialized in teaching swimming lessons to special needs children.

Sherri found out where Madison’s family lived. She took to driving by the house at all hours, hoping for a glimpse of someone in the Miller family, a small morsel to feed her hunger. The parents, the brothers, Betty the dog. Once she saw a minivan in the driveway. Two boys got out, both in baseball uniforms, with mitts. The younger one was punching his fist again and again into the mitt, to soften it, or out of anger.

What must it be like to be these boys, the brothers of a dead girl? Sherri wondered. To grow up alongside a ghost?