She didn’t believe in ghosts until her mother started talking to her on Mount Archer in the Pleasant Valley Preserve in southeastern Connecticut. She was stretching her calves in the little parking lot by the trailhead when she heard, clear as day, “Come on, Jessie. Enough now.”

Clear as day? She hated the clichés that crowded her mind when she thought of her mother. Clear as her mother’s voice, gone three years, buried five states away, at the top of no mountain.

The second time it happened she had just started her hike and was thinking about bears. She’d…