“Everything will be okay,” Sadie said. She reached over, and clasp my hand. “I think this trip will be good for you. You need a little distance.”
“I know.” I took in a deep breath.
“I mean it,” she insisted. “I heard someone say once that you can’t start the next chapter of your life, if you keep rereading the last one. It’s true, don’t you think?”
It was. On so many levels. “Yeah. I do.”
I was setting out to write a new chapter in my life. That didn’t mean I was erasing the previous ones. I was only adding to my story.
Emma would be proud of me, which was something I could live with. I would be okay. Dawson would be okay. Maybe not today, but someday. The promise of it warmed my heart.
Death is unavoidable. It’s part of life, but people are right when they say time is what you need to heal.
I let the guilt consuming me, the worry about whether I was making the right decision to leave, go.
Emma would have wanted me to.
She wanted me to live, and I couldn’t do that staying in Parish Cove.
I never could.
She knew this about me.
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Prologue
There’s only one question that plagues our fragile minds when we are forced to face the unthinkable, one question that never allows for any answers to suffice or even an ounce of comfort to be felt in some situations. It’s the question we tend to ask ourselves most when we can’t seem to wrap our heads around the circumstances that have been tossed our way unexpectedly.
And that crippling question is: Why?
That one, three-lettered word holds more power over our minds than any person could guess. When asked in the right context and combined with a precise situation, that simple question can hold disastrous consequences that could end a person in the worst of ways.
The question itself is essentially unavoidable. It will pass through your ears countless times in a year. It will flow from your lips in multiple tones for various reasons in a lifetime. And then there are those moments in life in which that tiny question will hold within it all the power to break you.
This story comes from one of those moments…a moment when that all-consuming question becomes the only feasible thought possible.
Chapter One
BLAIRE
“You’re not sick,” Paige grumbled from where she stood at the doorway to my room. “You just need to come out of this sterile place you call a bedroom and have some damn fun.”
The urge to chuck my pillow at her as hard as I could raged through me in a nearly overpowering rush. What didn’t she understand about the word no?
“I have to study and I feel like shit,” I said. The pillow I’d been holding over my head for the last few minutes was removed, but not by my hand. Somehow Paige managed to make it across the room and to the side of my bed without me noticing. Maybe it was due to the fact that my nose was still so stuffed up the muffle of my breathing was all I could hear. “Seriously, Paige! I feel like dog shit right now. Dog shit that was ran over. Twice.”
A chuckle escaped her and she moved to sit at the edge of my bed, unfazed by my outburst of melodrama at the situation.
“Then a night out is exactly what you need,” she insisted. “A chance to give your pretty little mind a freaking break. What good is all of this studying? You’re burning yourself out before finals. You’re just going to be exhausted and sleep deprived from it all.”
I scrunched my eyes up and glared at her. Her face was serious, but she obviously wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying. “Are you kidding me right now? You’re not even making any sense.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Yes I am.”
A smile twitched at the corners of my mouth, because she was clearly repeating what she’d just said to me in her mind, struggling to figure out if it made sense.
“No, it didn’t. You’re trying to persuade me into going to that stupid party with you instead of studying, because you think I’m cramming too heavily for finals and need a break. Won’t partying all night with you cause me to be more sleep deprived than studying would?”
She flipped her dark hair over her shoulder. “Nope.”
I laughed at her simplistic answer, which sent her into even more of a fit.
“All three of us are going out tonight, all right? Even if I have to drug your ass up with some Nyquil and you sleep right though all the fun, you’re still getting out of this damn bedroom and away from these papers and books.” She ruffled up my notebook papers and flipped my textbook over, making me lose my place.
“I can’t breathe through my nose and I’m pretty sure my voice sounds like I’ve been a chain smoker my entire life, because of my sore throat.” I attempted to fix the papers she’d messed up and flipped my book back over. “I’m not going out with you and Lauren tonight.”
“Please,” she pouted. I knew if I glanced her way there would be big brown puppy eyes pleading with me and a fat bottom lip poking out. “Pretty please, Blaire, just this once. You know I just broke up with Karl and could really use a girls’ night.”
She was pathetic when she pulled the puppy-dog look—pathetic, but undeniable, and she knew it. After all, like she’d said, she had just broken up with Karl. In spite of her being the one to do the dumping, I still felt bad for her. Karl had been sleeping with someone behind her back. Which would have been bad enough all on its own, but add in the fact Paige had caught him red-handed, and it made a bad situation that much worse.
“Oh my God, fine.” I slammed my book closed and tossed it to the side. “I’ll go out with you guys, but I’m not staying out past twelve or getting sloshed. Understood?”
Paige’s face lit up. “Understood. Now take a shower and some Sudafed and meet me in the living room in an hour. I’ll text Lauren.” She scrambled out of my room, her silky, dark hair bouncing across her shoulders as she went.
Paige Jacobs and I had known each other since our freshman year of high school. For whatever reason, we’d never hung out before then, even though we’d attended the same schools throughout our childhood. It wasn’t until we were crammed in Spanish class together that we realized we had two things in common. One, we both had only taken Spanish because we’d been forced to. Every student had to take at least one year of a foreign language. And two, we both had the hots for Ben Howard, a senior who didn’t know we existed.
“Lauren will be here in about forty. She said she’d be D.D. tonight. You know what that means?” Paige shouted in a singsong voice from somewhere in the apartment we shared.