“Kent, Kent, oh my god,” I whisper in a voice I don’t even recognize as my own. “Don’t worry, I’m here. I’m here. You’re going to be okay. Tell me where — tell me what to do. Tell me how to help.”

  I look for the source of the bleeding, but he’s bleeding everywhere — from his nose, from his ears, from his mouth. His head, his abdomen, his legs. He tries to speak and I see his white teeth are stained red.

  “No use,” he gasps out, chest shuddering with the effort. Like there’s a boulder pressing down on him, growing heavier with each breath.

  “What? No. No, don’t you dare say that,” I snap, crying as my hands move over his stomach, trying to staunch the flow of blood with my fingertips — a river of blood, an ocean of blood, an unstoppable tide my ineffectual hands can do nothing to yield. “You’re fine. You’re going to be just fine.”

  My desperate lies don’t convince him.

  “Kat,” he says — the first time he’s ever used my name, and it sounds like a prayer on his lips. “Kat—”

  I bite through my lip so I won’t scream.

  Keeping one hand on the worst of his wounds, the big one in his abdomen where glass and metal ripped through him like a knife through a block of cheese, I reach into his pocket and pull out his cellphone. My fingers are so wet with blood, it takes a few tries before the screen recognizes my keystrokes. I push the emergency button and wait for the call to connect, cursing each passing second.

  “911, what is your emergency?”

  “There’s been an accident,” I yell into the receiver. “Please, you have to come, straightaway!”

  “What is your location, ma’am?” The disembodied voice is so composed I want to reach through the line and strangle the woman it belongs to.

  Doesn’t she realize how bad this is?

  Doesn’t she know my friend is dying?

  I do my best to give a description of our location, slightly relieved when she informs me another motorist already called it in.

  “Emergency personnel should reach you within five minutes.”

  Five minutes.

  An eternity.

  Too long, too long, too long.

  My heart is splintering inside my chest.

  “We’re down the embankment. My friend — he’s hurt. You have to come. Please come… he’s… I think… I think he might be…” I shake myself. “Please, just get here!”

  Masters wheezes in pain.

  I drop the phone into the dirt and move both my hands back to the gaping wound, applying pressure as best I can. I pull my soaked dress train up and try to use it as a compress; his blood saturates the fabric so fast there’s little point.

  “Don’t worry,” I lie to him, trying to sound positive despite the tears coursing from my eyes, falling onto his face, mixing with the steady flow of raindrops from the sky. “They’re coming, Kent. They’re coming.”

  His eyes meet mine again, hazy with pain.

  “Tell her…” He coughs, blood flying from his lips, spraying against my face as I lean close to catch his words. “Tell her…”

  I grab his hand and squeeze it as tight as I can. “Tell her yourself, when you see her later.”

  A sound rattles in his throat.

  A sound like death.

  A second later, I watch his eyes lose focus, the life draining out of them as the blood drains from his body into the earth. His face goes slack. His chest stops moving up and down in labored breaths.

  “No!” My voice breaks on a scream. “Don’t you dare leave, Kent Masters. You hang on. Do you hear me? You just hang on for a few more minutes. Just hang on, and everything will be okay.”

  But it’s not okay.

  He can’t hang on.

  He’s already gone.

  The rain falls, but I don’t feel it.

  The flashing lights arrive, but I don’t see them.

  The paramedics scramble down to us, shouting questions, but I don’t hear them.

  I am numb.

  I stare unseeing at the body of my friend. There are twin streaks of red on his eyelids from where my bloody fingers closed his vacant eyes, unable to bear looking at them anymore. Unable to see them staring lifelessly at the sky.

  The first responders pull me to my feet and shine a light into my pupils. Their words make no sense. They are unrecognizable. Another language, another place.

  Their nonsensical syllables belong to a world that still makes sense. A world where good men don’t die for no reason and your best friend gets to live happily ever after with the man she loves.

  A world I no longer exist in.

  A paramedic is examining the wound on my head, mouthing words at me. I watch his lips, their funny shapes forming vowels and consonants, articulating and annunciating. Like a game you play in the pool on a hot summer day, shouting at your friends beneath the surface, trying to get them to guess your meaning. If you’re lucky, you might catch one word out of a dozen.

  “He’s DOA… in shock… possible head trauma… contusions… glass… stretcher…”

  They move Masters’ body onto a stiff board and carry him up the embankment, to the waiting vehicle. I start to trail after them, my strappy heels sinking into the mud with each step, now that I’m on my feet. I quickly find my progress halted by a steely grip.

  “Ma’am, can you hear me?”

  Sluggishly, I glance at him — the brave paramedic. He’s young. My age, maybe. Twenty-two and invincible. A whole life ahead of us.

  There’s no rush, Harper’s voice says inside my head. We have all the time in the world.

  A sound slips from my lips. A hysterical, horrible sound I cannot contain. Not a laugh, not a sob, not a scream. Some terrible mix of all three.

  “Ma’am, I need you to sit, okay? They’re bringing down a stretcher for you. Can you sit? I promise, it’s all going to be okay.”

  My throat closes abruptly, cutting off the noise in an instant. I blink at him.

  “He’s dead.”

  My voice is empty.

  My heart is shattered.

  “Masters. He’s dead.”

  The paramedic nods. “I’m very sorry for your loss, ma’am, but right now we need to take care of you. You might have a concussion and you’re bleeding pretty profusely.”

  “I am?” I ask, looking down at myself. In the light of the SUV high-beams, I see the pretty coral shade of my dress is drenched darker red down the front and along the hem.

  “That’s not my blood,” I murmur, feeling light headed. Suddenly, sitting down doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. “It’s not my blood,” I repeat softly, as he lowers me to the ground.

  “Where the hell is that stretcher?” the paramedic yells up the embankment. “She’s fading!”

  I hear a ripping sound and look down to see the young medic has sliced my dress wide open with a pair of razor-sharp shears. He’s feeling my legs, running his hands up and down my flesh, muttering to himself.

  “Where is all this damn blood coming from?”

  And then… I know.

  “I—” I start, but can’t get the words out. “I think—”

  He looks up at me, concern etched on his features. His face alternates red then blue then yellow as the world flips between the steady SUV headlights and flashing ambulance strobes.

  “I think…” I look up at the sky and say the words to the stars, so I don’t have to see the look in his eyes. My voice is a broken whisper. “I think I’m having a miscarriage.”

  The stars swim for a moment, fuzzy and unfocused, and then everything goes totally black.

  I float in the darkness. It’s not entirely unpleasant.

  No more pain. No more sorrow.

  Maybe I should stay here.

  “Female crash victim, approximately twenty years old, lost consciousness in the field!”

  I was always meant for the shadows, anyway. Some people say I gravitate toward them, but I think they have it backwards: the shadows have always gravitated toward me.

  “Multiple contusions to her arms, legs, and temple. Pupils are equal and reactive to light.”

  There’s something soothing about the dark. People let their secrets out, in the small hours of the night. Their masks come off. Their guards come down.

  “We’ve got a pulse, but it’s irregular.”

  You can be totally yourself in the witching hours; maybe because there’s no one else awake to judge you.

  “She’s losing pressure.”

  I am a creature of shadows. Some people like the dark; I’m made of the dark. The dark is in my blood, in each beat of my heart. So it’s not totally disturbing to find myself adrift here, detached from the flashing lights and screaming sirens and creeping absence of a friend I was not prepared to say goodbye to yet.

  “She’s lost at least a liter of blood. Possible miscarriage. Get someone from OB down here.”

  Yes. Maybe I will stay here. Maybe it’s where I belong.

  “She’s in v-tach! Get the crash cart!”

  The light is too hard. Too harsh. Too bright.

  “Code blue!”

  Bringing all your flaws sharply into focus.

  “We’re losing her!”

  You cannot hide, in the light. Not from pain or sorrow or loss or despair.

  “Push one of epi and atropine!”

  Why would you choose to feel any of that? Why would you pick blinding pain when you could float in the dark forever?

  “Charge to two hundred!”

  The dark is comforting. Swaying. Lulling.

  “CLEAR!”

  A flash. A flicker. A strike of lighting, in the darkness.

  “Push another epi!”

  There’s something I’m forgetting. A fragment of a memory at the corner of my mind, on the tip of my tongue, just out of reach.

  “Charge to three hundred!”

  Choose sunshine, baby. Always choose sunshine. You look so much prettier with the light in your eyes.

  “CLEAR!”

  Wyatt. Wyatt. Wyatt.

  “Again!”

  I grasp onto the thought. A faint touch of dawn in the night sky. A flickering candle, guiding me back.

  “We’ve got sinus rhythm. Pressure is returning.”

  The sun is rising.

  “We got her back, barely. Let’s get her to the OR, stat. She’s still got a long fight ahead of her tonight.”

  When I was ten years old, I borrowed a tattered copy of Gone with the Wind from the library after school one day. I didn’t want to — the librarian thrust it into my unwilling hands when I discovered the latest volume of The Babysitters Club had already been checked out by brown-nosing Susie Lowell and wouldn’t be returned for fourteen insufferable days.

  I fully expected to hate every word of the dog-eared volume, which felt thicker than the dictionary in my hands. I remember walking home, backpack near to bursting, zipper straining under the effort, vowing not even to crack it open. Surely nothing so long-winded and old-fashioned could be of interest to my barely-formed brain.

  And yet…

  I opened it.

  I flew through the pages until my eyes were shot with red, until my lids were drooping closed, until the flashlight clutched in my fingertips ran out of batteries and I was forced to close the cover and fall asleep, otherwise risk waking Cynthia and whichever husband she was married to at that point.

  For the next week, I lived between those pages. Every spare minute. I couldn’t put it down. I was captivated. I’d never read a story like that in my life. Up till then, it had all been perfect heroines and infallible princes. The villains never won. Good always prevailed over evil, no matter what.

  Not in that book, though.

  War and deceit and betrayal and agony saturated those pages. There were no clear-cut lines, no perfect characters. Just a flawed heroine who does what she can to survive, whatever the cost. A woman who spends half her life in love with the wrong man, too stubborn and self-destructive to recognize her own folly until it’s far, far too late to rectify things.

  I cried, when I finished — big, miserable, crocodile tears. And the next day, I marched that stupid, horrible, awful book straight back to the library, shoved it into the amused librarian’s hands, and demanded answers.

  Where’s the next one?

  She said there was no next one. I’d reached the end.

  I tried reasoning with her.

  Surely, the story cannot end like that. Surely, Scarlett finds her way back to Rhett. Surely, the author did not mean for me to live the rest of my life hanging by my fingertips on the edge of a cliff, wondering what happened to characters I’ve come to love so deeply.

  I glared at the librarian when she shook her head no.

  I didn’t understand. I thought, frankly my dear, the author must give a damn. She must write a better ending. A happy ending, where all the characters get the things they deserve. Otherwise, what was the point of reading the dumb book in the first place?

  The librarian laughed and said it was good practice.

  For what? I hissed, full of piss and vinegar.

  For life, she said, handing me the Babysitter’s Club book that I no longer had a lick of interest in.

  I never read Gone with the Wind again.

  But I never forgot the lesson it taught me.

  Not all stories have happy endings.

  Sometimes, the villains win.

  Sometimes, the heroes die.

  Sometimes, life breaks your fucking heart into so many pieces, you think you’ll never be whole again.

  But you carry on.

  You push through.

  You keep trying.

  Because life is all one big, endless cliffhanger — riddled with uncertainties and inconsistencies, each page suffused with complex characters and heart-aching plot twists that take your breath away. There’s nothing you can do to change that.

  All you can do is choose the sunshine instead of the shadows. All you can do is hang onto the knowledge that no matter how dark the night, the sun always rises in the morning and chases away the doom.

  Because… no matter what…. tomorrow is another goddamned day.

  Fifteen

  “You can trust me.”

  - A super-villain.

  “Baby, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Carrying in the kitchen stuff.” I roll my eyes. “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?”

  “I hired movers for a reason.” Wyatt scowls at me, crosses the room, and yanks the box from my grip. “To move things.”

  I cross my arms and glare at him. “Bossy.”

  He grins. “Beautiful.”

  “Stubborn man.”

  “Stunning girl.”

  “It was one tiny box. Did you not hear me say kitchen stuff?” I snort. “We both know I don’t cook. All that’s in there is an ancient garlic press and stale box of Girl Scout cookies from my pantry.”

  “Not the point,” he grumbles, pulling me into his arms. “We aren’t taking any more chances.”

  I tilt my head up to look at him, scrunching my nose but deciding not to argue.

  He kisses me fleetingly, then crouches down, puts both his hands on my stomach, and plants another kiss there. My fingers slip into his long hair, stroking absently.

  “Hear that, watermelon?” he whispers. “No more chances.”

  A smile touches my lips. I’ve grown so massive in the past few months, my stomach now protrudes out over my jeans, bigger than a basketball.

  “I’m huge,” I complain, frequently.

  “You’re beautiful,” Wyatt counters, always.

  The doctors told us it was a miracle I didn’t lose the baby, the night Masters died. The stress of the crash coupled with my other injuries and a partially-ruptured placenta meant there was something like a ninety-five percent chance of termination when I finally arrived at the hospital and was rushed into surgery.

  I was the five percent.

  The miracle case.

  Recovery from my physical injuries — a concussion, two sprained wrists, severe bruising, and lacerations over twenty percent of my body, many of which needed stitches — took a long time.

  Recovery from my emotional injuries — well, we’ll call it a work in progress.

  Every morning, I wake in Wyatt’s arms. I watch the sun rise from the gazebo in his yard as I drink a cup of decaf coffee and re-read his book for the hundredth time. The new version, republished with his honest-to-god name on the front, not my tattered old paperback.

  Every morning, I ask myself the same question.

  Can I survive this pain?

  And, every morning, the answer is the same.

  I can survive.

  I will survive.

  Because I am not the sad, broken girl who swooned despite her better judgment for a man who warned her against it. I am not the twisted creature, consumed by self-doubt and delusions of soul mates, who let an incapable man lead her astray. I am not the girl seeking the validation of a woman who refused to relinquish it. I am not the struggling actress, begging for roles I don’t want.

  I have been to hell and back, but I am stronger now. Forged by fires of my own making into steel and self-determination. Loved by a man who is made of light and hope and happiness. And, finally, able to love him back with every part of me, even the dark parts I feared, for so many years, to expose to the light.

  “Go inside, please.” Wyatt kisses the tip of my nose gently. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I’m supposed to be a lot of things,” I remind him. “In labor, for one.”

  “You can’t rush perfection.” He touches my stomach again. “Don’t you know by now, tiny dictators make their own rules?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I grumble, grinning at him despite myself.

  It feels strange sometimes, to be so full of life and joy and love, after what happened to Masters. After what happened with Harper.

  The grin slides off my face.

  I miss my best friend so much, sometimes, it levels me. I’m haunted by the last words I spoke to her.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26