HOW COULD we not have known? I look back now and it’s a question I can circle and examine from every angle and still not find an answer to. One answer is that we did know that something was wrong, but we had no context for it. We were reassured that young women struggled, did strange things, went through rough patches. And it was so much easier to find ways to blame Jon. Jon—with his shifty friends and his perpetual snarl—had been a bad influence. And Penny had always been susceptible to influence, her heart so big and soft and porous.

In retrospect, I can see the mental gymnastics my parents and I went through to explain it to ourselves. A woman lies about how she lost a pregnancy because she is ashamed that her fiancé has left her, abandoned her in a precarious state. And she’s so humiliated by this and so mad with grief when she loses her babies that she invents another narrative where he is coming to her rescue: he’s on his way and will get there as soon as his uncooperative truck will allow him. She convinces herself that he too is grieving and is desperate to be by her side just as soon as he can. Or, there is the version Emily hears, that Jon has made it back in time to be by her side, to squeeze her hand and cry with her through the devastation, to say goodbye to the two little girls, tiny and blue and gone from this world. Not one lie, but two separate lies, perhaps more. Perhaps one in which my parents were there, I was there. It was around this time, we’d later find out, that Penny’s virtual online life began to grow tentacles. There were hidden Facebook groups and secret pages that no one who knew Penny in real life would see until much later. In these dark corners of Penny’s invented identity, she would live out alternate realities: that the twins had lived but were in the NICU, balanced between life and death; that one had died but the other had survived, leaving her with one beautiful living baby and one set of tiny footprints in plaster to remember the other; that both babies had lived but her fiancé had died trying to get home to them. For now, all of this remained in the shadows.