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addition, whatever Mitch did in life, he put his heart and soul into, whether digging a trench on the job, coaching a basketball team, or supporting his family. For this, some later said, Mitch had gone too far with Erika and was too intense with his pushing basketball on her.
    On the other hand, hindsight, Mitch said, was always going to give people what they believed to be a clearer picture of any situation. If nothing had ever happened to Erika, no one, in other words, would have ever accused Mitch of going overboard with his raising her to be an overachiever.
    “Intense? If there is anything worth doing,” Mitch recalled, “it’s worth doing to the best of your ability. . . . I always felt Erika could do anything she worked hard enough to do. I loved basketball too much and still do. I love coaching, which I quit [in 2002] because I did not feel I could do it to my best [ability]. I loved watching her play. I never missed a game.... I guess, looking back . . . you realize the big things you worried about every day in life were nothing . They were so little and really unimportant . . . . I know for a fact that when people are in a situation . . . people will look back and say a lot about you, things that are only highlighted because of this [new] situation, and meant nothing before. Most people will not speak up to say something good, but their memory gets great about adversity.”

8
    The Ghost Husband
    They’d lost touch since high school, but one day in 2001, Kristin Heinbaugh was at the local Altoona mall when she ran into Erika, her mother, Cookie, and Erika’s new man, Benjamin Sifrit. Erika and BJ had met during the spring of 1999, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, at a bar. They exchanged names, but it went nowhere.
    It was BJ; he wasn’t interested. He had been focused for most of his adult life on his career as a U.S. Navy SEAL and, upon meeting Erika, had a vision of what he wanted to do in life—which did not include a wife.
    A few months later, in late July, however, BJ and Erika ran into each other again at a SEAL party and began a more “steady relationship,” as BJ later called it. Two weeks after that, Erika and BJ were in Ocean City, New Jersey, where they met up with Mitch and Cookie for the first time. Erika looked happy in the photographs she took of the trip, as did BJ, who was smiling and cuddling Erika close to him. They were already talking about getting married, but they weren’t sharing the news with anyone.
    “Hey, how you been, Erika?” Kristin asked, walking over, noticing Erika and Cookie just browsing in the mall. The guy with Erika, Kristin noticed, looked strangely uninvolved with the chance meeting. He was looking around, surely indifferent to the conversation. Erika smiled. Kristin could tell she thought it was great to see an old friend. A touch of what her old life used to be like was there in front of her and it gave Erika a jolt or even a sense of comfort. Since leaving college and hooking up with BJ, Erika had been running on empty; becoming, some later said, in just over a few weeks after meeting him, dangerously obsessed with the guy to the point where she was going out of her mind.
    “What have you been doing with your life, Erika?” Kristin asked. Erika didn’t look so good. Skinnier than she had ever been. Quite gaunt and tired.
    As they started talking, BJ drifted away from the group without saying anything. It was odd to Kristin that he never stuck out his hand to introduce himself, or even acknowledged that he was with Erika.
    A ghost, essentially.
    It was uncomfortable. BJ had “no desire,” Kristin later recalled, “to meet.” It was weird, too. He was so into not wanting to be noticed that his behavior actually stood out. Unlike a bored husband whose wife is off rummaging through clearance racks inside a department store, BJ walked away without saying a word, but making it known that he wasn’t interested in socializing. It made Kristin feel as though she