PROLOGUE
ELLIE
I always imaginedcar crashes would feel like they were happening in slow motion.
I can picture it in my mind—the sudden impact followed by a sedate roll of the car, bodies seemingly suspended in midair as the car pitches. Hair floating around your head like you’re underwater. The sound muted and far away, as if it isn’t quite in full focus.
Undoubtedly, I’ve been influenced by Hollywood in this imagery, but it somehow seems appropriate. Such a big, tragic moment should feel slow and quiet. You know, like the whole life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing. Time to process what’s happening, what you might lose.
Well, Hollywoodlies. I know, shocking.
Car crashes aren’t slow or quiet. They’re fast, loud, and painfully chaotic. I didn’t have time to process anything. Didn’t even have time to panic. I think I remember a flash of bright light beforehand, but I can’t be sure. Replaying the moments before the crash feels like trying to recall a dream that keeps slipping out of my grasp. The harder I try, the farther away it gets.
The crash itself, though, feels like a vivid movie scene I can’t get out of my head. So big and traumatizing it eclipses anything else that happened before. I want to scrub it from my memory.
The sound is forever branded in my brain, the loud screech and ear-splitting clash of metal. The unexpected force of going sideways in the car—something that feels entirely unnatural and wrong—made me think of being on a roller coaster with a blindfold.
I wish I could forget it all, every single moment. The reprieve of just having a black hole in my memory taunts me. What a relief it would be not to feel the crushing weight of this…this nightmare.
I don’t want to remember the blinding pain or the blackness that followed.
I don’t want to remember the sirens or the screams.
I desperately don’t want to remember the night my mom died or the drunk-driving assholes who killed her.
Sometimes I wake up and forget for a moment. Just a tiny instance of escape from my reality.Ignorance is bliss.That’s the saying, right? I get it. Not knowing feels infinitely better than the alternative.
Because the very second I remember what happened feels like the first time I woke up in the hospital and the memories came rushing back. There is no ignorance with memories. No matter how much I want to, there is no way to remove them from my head. I’ve checked.
One day this anger and grief won’t be suffocating.
One day I won’t be afraid of getting in a car.
One day I will think of my mom and smile, not cry.
But not today.
CHAPTER ONE
ELLIE
My dead motherjust called me.
Okay, obviouslyshedidn’t call me, but I cannot overstate the absolute mindfuck of seeingMomon my caller ID five years to the day after her death.
Dad, one. Ellie, zero.
Not that he was trying to be funny—he would never pull a joke like that on me. Poor guy didn’t realize the trauma he’d inflict with a simple phone call announcing he’d found Mom’s phone while going through some of her things. From said phone. I can’t believe he’s still paying to keep it active.
He’s at home, excited to be scrolling her saved pictures and messages. And I’m fourteen hundred miles away, drinking alone in a bar at two thirty in the afternoon. You could say we process differently.
“Another?” The bartender interrupts my staring contest with the empty shot glass.
Glancing up, I feel the burn take over my cheeks as I realize I don’t know how to answer him. I think if I ask the bartender the question that’s on the tip of my tongue, he’s going to cut me off.
I’m definitely not drunk and I don’t think I can handle the embarrassment of him and the single other bar patron thinking I am. Because I’ve only taken two shots.
I think.
