Prologue
Avery
Iwas convinced that watching someone you loved die was more painful than any death you might suffer yourself.
Some deaths were peaceful, slow, and anticipated. My father’s was violent, painstakingly sudden, and unexpected.
I watched him leave this world from the front seat of his car, sinking in a river, knowing I should’ve died too. It was the most painful thing I’d ever experienced—losing the person I loved most in the world.
But the scariest part of it all wasn’t the fall off the bridge, the impact of the water, or seeing the life leave his eyes. It was learning the truth at the end of his life and knowing I could’ve done something to save him.
1
Avery
Choosing what ice cream flavor to get was as crucial of a decision as deciding where to go to school.
At least, that was what my dad had led me to believe.
“Is that what you think you want in here?” He’d tap me on the head. “Or is that what you really want in here?” he’d ask, poking me in the chest.
Whether it was deciding what instrument I’d wanted to play when I was six or what color I’d wanted to paint my room when I was eight, he always made every choice feel like I was choosing my future.
In a way, I was. I was making a choice that would affect my future happiness.
There was the longer period of happiness that had faded when my lime-green walls were painted over with that ugly taupe color my mother had insisted on once I became a teenager. And then there was short-lived but immediate happiness, like the time it had taken me to finish my cookie dough ice cream cone my dad had treated me to on our way home from my piano concert that one fateful night.
After that—after the accident—I had to start making those decisions on my own. He wasn’t there for the really big moments. The ones that mattered. The ones that mapped out my future.
My mom was the complete opposite of my dad. She had taught me to use reason and to be careful. With my dad being gone for so long, I started to fear that I’d become too comfortable, using my head more often than my heart—or worse, that I couldn’t tell the difference between the two anymore.
My most recent decision, I wassuremy heart had made because I ended up heartbroken and homeless. And if there was one thing I knew, it was that the choices made by the heart could never be trusted. But then again, choices made from the soundest mind could end in disaster as well.
The key was choosing which one to use at the right moment.
I blinked up at the brick-front home I was standing in front of. The front porch was oversize. Flowerpots filled with blue violets hung from above while a wooden swing with chipped white paint swayed in the light breeze. The place was something I imagined moving into after med school, once things settled down. The perfect place to start a family, and there was plenty of room here to do that—if that was what I wanted. Definitely not what I’d pictured a bunch of musicians living in.
“You have flowers?” I teased.
My brother glanced over his shoulder as he stepped off the curb to help unload the rest of my car. “Oh yeah. That was Lexie. She likes things to be colorful.”
A drop of sweat rolled down the seam of my back, and I cursed up at the sun resting in a cloudless blue sky. It was probably the hottest day Silicon Valley had ever seen in February, but at least it wasn’t raining. That would’ve really been a poetic way to end the kind of day I was having.
“You have a lot of shit, you know that?” Danny groaned, waiting next to the trunk of my car.
“It’s the last one, I promise.” I sighed, handing him a cardboard box with the wordspathology and biochemistryscribbled across the side in permanent marker. I hadn’t gotten all of my belongings into my temporary bedroom yet, and I already felt like a burden.
Danny grunted when I released the full weight of the box into his hands. “Jesus! What’s in here, dumbbells?”
I laughed. Carrying my textbooks up and down the stairs at school was as close to lifting weights as I got. Considering my book bag weighed at least twenty pounds, I decided that was a sufficient amount of exercise and a good enough reason to avoid the gym.
He craned his neck to read the side of the box, and his eyes bulged. “Morebooks?”
I shrugged, grabbing the one box I didn’t want Danny touching and my hamper, full of cotton sheets and the white butterfly comforter I had saved from my first four years of college. The innocent, almost-childlike pattern made me want to shake my younger self silly, but it would work for now.
“All of my notes on those classes are in there too. I never know when I’m going to need them for reference, especially this year,” I said, following him up the front steps, eager to get out of the sun and rest.
Staying with my brother and his bandmates wasn’t ideal, but the sudden change in my relationship status had left me with next to no options. It was either this or move back home to live with my mother, and I’d promised myself I’d never do that. Once I’d walked out of that pristine six-thousand-square-foot fortress, a weight had lifted from me that I refused to carry again.
