Four months after losing my 11-year-old daughter, we moved away to start over — then my 5-year-old said, “Mom, I saw Ava in the window across the street.”

Four months earlier, my eleven-year-old daughter, Maren, had died in a car accident.

My husband, Graham, had picked her up after school that afternoon. They were less than fifteen minutes from home when another driver lost control at an intersection and crashed into the passenger side of Graham’s car.

Graham survived with a broken arm, three fractured ribs, and a scar running along his temple.

Maren never came home.

There are losses people tell you time will soften.

Maybe they’re right.

But four months isn’t time.

Four months is still opening the refrigerator and finding the yogurt your child liked. It’s hearing a girl laugh in a grocery store and turning around before your mind can stop you. It’s waking at three in the morning because for two seconds you forgot, and then remembering all over again.

I might have stayed in bed forever if I didn’t still have Lucy.

Lucy was five and had worshipped her older sister.

Maren braided her hair, read bedtime stories to her, and let her sleep in her room whenever thunderstorms frightened her. For weeks after the funeral, Lucy asked when Maren was coming back.

Eventually, she stopped asking.

That frightened me almost as much.

Graham was the one who suggested we move.

Our old house had become unbearable for both of us. Maren’s shoes were still beside the back door. Her handwriting was on the family calendar. I couldn’t walk past her bedroom without feeling as though someone had reached inside my chest.

Graham found a house in a quiet city about three hours away.

I barely looked at the photographs before agreeing.

At the time, I thought he was stronger than I was. He arranged the viewings, dealt with the realtor, chose the neighborhood, and handled most of the paperwork while I moved through each day as if I were underwater.

The new house was pale blue with a small front porch and a maple tree beside the driveway.

For the first few nights, I slept better than I had in months.

There were no marks on the kitchen wall showing Maren’s height.

No chipped tile from the time she dropped a bowl while making brownies.

The new walls didn’t know what we’d lost.

Then, one Tuesday morning, I went upstairs to help Lucy get ready for preschool and found her standing at the window in her pajamas.

Her backpack was open on the floor.

She was staring at the house directly across the street.

“Mom, I saw Maren in that window, and I think she lives over there now.”

Every muscle in my body tightened.

I went to the window.

The house looked ordinary enough, though strangely quiet. Cream-colored siding, dark green shutters, two upstairs windows facing ours.

Nobody was there.

I crouched beside Lucy and explained as gently as I could that grief sometimes made us think we saw people we missed.

She became upset immediately.

This wasn’t a dream, she insisted. She had seen Maren move the curtain and look directly at her.

I held her until she stopped crying.

All day, I worried.

Maybe I’d been so buried in my own grief that I’d failed to see how badly Lucy was struggling.

The next afternoon, she came running while I was unpacking plates.

Her face was flushed.

“I’m not lying, Mommy. She was there again, and she looked at me before she went away.”

This time, something uneasy settled inside me.

That evening, after Lucy fell asleep, I carried a chair into her room.

I told myself I wasn’t waiting for a dead child to appear.

I was waiting to see what living child my daughter had mistaken for her sister.

For almost an hour, nothing happened.

Then the curtain in the upstairs window across the street moved.

A girl stepped into view.

I stood so quickly the chair scraped behind me.

She looked about eleven.

Dark brown hair fell over one shoulder. She was thin, perhaps a little taller than Maren had been.

Before I could see her face properly, she noticed me.

The curtain snapped shut.

I barely slept.

The next morning, I baked an apple pie.

It was something my mother had taught me to do whenever meeting new neighbors, though as I rolled the dough, I realized my hands were shaking.

Graham walked into the kitchen and asked who the pie was for.

When I told him I planned to introduce myself to the people across the street, something changed in his face.

It disappeared quickly.

Too quickly.

He suggested I leave them alone for a few days, saying we’d barely finished unpacking and Lucy’s confusion didn’t need to become someone else’s problem.

I told him I’d seen the girl too.

Graham looked down at his coffee.

Then he offered to deliver the pie himself.

That was when the first real thread of suspicion pulled tight inside me.

He had claimed he hadn’t met the neighbors.

So why was he suddenly so eager to keep me from doing exactly that?

I picked up the pie.

Before leaving, I asked whether there was anything he needed to tell me.

He looked pale.