Chapters:

Chapter One

Everything began, as far as I’m concerned, on the night Gabriel and I were driving back from our friend’s party.

An angry snowstorm that blanketed the entire street in white. From the passenger seat I watched as Gabriel, leaning slightly over the steering wheel, maneuvered his car through the snow. It fell in heavy sheets all around us, whipped around by the wind, and made it impossible to see more than a few inches in front of the car. Though the way the headlights reflected off the snow made it impossible to know for sure, Gabriel was confident that they were the only ones out on the two-lane street on a night like that. A night when smarter people would have rescheduled the party they planned for their friend and stayed inside where it was warm.

I bundled myself up tighter in my gray coat that flared out at the hip, then stuck my hands out to feel the warmth of the heater blow through my mittens. Really, it was my idea to keep the party on schedule despite knowing well in advance that a snowstorm was blowing in from the north, and that it was supposed to be a big one.

Her name was Melissa and she had moved out of the city to Wilmington earlier that year after getting married. No longer craving the exciting life of New York City, Melissa and her husband found a cute little place an hour and a half outside city limits. It had a big backyard and overlooked a heavily forested hiking trail. When the snow began, the other girls in our group marveled over how beautiful it was as it settled on the leaves and over the rocks. If I didn’t have to get back and finish my book, we would’ve likely stayed behind with them and spent the night. The husbands were in the basement playing video games while the wives were upstairs drinking wine and watching movies.

“Are you sure?” Asked Katie, one of the others in our small group of five. “It’s supposed to get really bad. Seriously, we could just reschedule. Mel won’t mind.”

“I really don’t think it’ll be that bad,” I said, thinking I knew everything.

After talking to Katie for a while, then having the same conversation three more times, I managed to convince everyone that it wouldn’t be that bad and the party could still go on. When we drove up there that morning, it really wasn’t terrible. Cold and gray maybe, but not a single drop of snow on the ground or hint of ice. The storm hit during the party and persisted throughout, proving that God laughs when you make plans.

The party was great, though. Gabriel and I got Melissa the collection of books she was pining after, Katie and her boyfriend got her an expensive eye shadow pallet from Sephora, Danielle and her fiance Lisa got her a pair of boots, and Bethany (freshly broken up with her boyfriend) produced an expensive bottle of wine that they were likely sharing as Gabriel and I drove home.

Honestly I was eager to get back, but not because I had to finish the edits for my latest book and contact the book tour company to double check the dates for when I would appear on which blogs. All night I had been sitting on a huge secret, and I was eager to tell.

From the radio spewed forth the weather report. I barely listened. Gabriel sometimes told me I was too easily bored by things such as weather and news, and that someday I might have to actually listen to it instead of tuning it out. Well, the hypothetical day Gabriel mentioned surely wasn’t that day. That day I was too busy staring out into the impossibly deep, dark night and wondering when and how I should tell him my big secret. It had to be done just right. I only had one chance to do it.

I turned to look at him, reached over, and grabbed his hand, squeezing it. In the green half-light, which cast shadows over the ridges of his high cheekbones and somewhat long nose, he smiled.

After that, everything that followed stuck in my memory in snapshots. The blinding white light of another car appearing on the road in time to fishtail into our lane—Gabriel shouting as he yanked the wheel as fast as he could, sending our own car into a tailspin of its own—the snap of the rusted road guard tearing apart as we tore through it—the furious, metallic crunch, crunch, crunch of the roof of our car coming in contact with the ground before flipping again, and again, and again—then nothing until a bald man in a policeman’s uniform shined a light in through the window. I groaned, my whole body aching. Why was he upside-down? Why was my hair standing up? Why was the roof so lumpy and close? It seemed like it took forever before my mind was even kind of aware of what had happened. Even then, I couldn’t register it entirely.

“Ma’am,” The officer said, his voice loud and full of authority. “Ma’am, can you hear me?”

“Where’s . . . where’s Gabriel . . . ?”

But I passed back out before I heard the answer.



I woke up in the hospital several days later, too disoriented to know where I was or to remember what happened. My Doctor—Dr. Carmichael—tested my response time and asked me several questions to ascertain what I remembered and what I didn’t. Though it took a bit, I was able to tell him that I remembered going to the party we threw for my friend Melissa, and that she didn’t get out to the city much anymore so we had her husband help us.

He asked about the accident, and I described to him what I remembered from the vague snapshots my mind was able to hold form in the moment. It was enough, I supposed, to rule out amnesia of any kind because the doctor nodded to himself and wrote something down on the chart in his hands. He filled in the rest for me as best he could using the information he got from the officers on the scene. That we had been run off Country Route 10 by another car, and that we’d fallen several feet into a heavily wooded area. Apparently, I was lucky to be alive. The car itself was totaled, and I was out in the blizzard for several hours before emergency personnel arrived.

“Where’s Gabriel?” I asked, my throat sore from not speaking and not having something to drink for so long. The doctor must have heard it, because he asked a passing nurse to bring me some water. When he didn’t answer right away, I asked again. “Where’s my husband?”

“Mrs. Moreau . . . your husband . . . he was DOA.”

Dr. Carmichael might as well have punched me in the chest as blunt and painful as his words were. I stared at him, stupidly. Then when I opened my mouth my tongue felt like it had swollen ten times its normal size in the span of a few seconds, and what came out sounded incredibly dumb. “Wh-whuh-what?”

Dark clouds settled over my doctor’s face. They seeped into the deep-down wrinkles in his skin and made him appear so much paler than before. In a moment of metal absence and utter stupidity, I wondered how taxing it must be to deliver this kind of news on what I guessed was a daily basis.

“Your husband was dead when officials arrived on the scene,” Dr. Carmichael tried again. “He had been thrown through the windshield before the car hit the ground for the final time. There was nothing that could be done for him. Or for . . .your baby.”

“My baby . . . ?” I put my hand over where my baby was supposed to be, where it had been when I got into the car to leave Melissa’s party. “I . . . I lost . . . ?”

But I couldn’t even finish it. I crumpled over in tears. After a moment of me crying alone on my crisp white hospital bed, being stared at by family-friendly paintings of big-eyed puppy dogs and a little bronze figure of Jesus on a dark brown stained cross, Dr. Carmichael set my chart down on the bed and comforted me.



I didn’t have to be the one to identify Gabriel’s body. Melissa, Kelly, Danielle, Bethany, and all of their respective significant others all came to do it for me. They even handled all the funeral arrangements and the calling of Gabriel’s mom and sisters. They were my personal cheer leading squad for a speedy recovery. At least one of them was at my side every minute, no matter how little I said or how very much I wanted to be left alone. I didn’t want anyone around.

The night before Gabriel’s funeral, I heard Danielle and Kelly asking Dr. Carmichael if there was a chance that I suffered any head trauma, and if I did, could it change my personality?

“Well, that is a common side-effect of head-related injuries, but I’ve been watching Mrs. Moreau and there doesn’t seem to be any changes. Why do you ask?”

“Because she’s—different.” I didn’t like how Kelly said ’different.’ She said it like it was a dirty word. Something sour on her tongue. The way it hit me—it made me angry. Angry and resentful of her. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t even bring myself to lift my head off the pillow.

“She acts like she hates us,” Danielle elaborated. “She won’t talk to us, won’t even sit up half the time. Come on, you have had to have noticed the way she will just bark at people! That’s not Blaire. She used to be so easy going and fun, but now—now its like she’d rather be by herself than with the people who love her. I tried bringing her one of her favorite books the other day and do you know what she did? She took it, said ’thanks’ like she was pissed off, and just put it on the table by the bed!”

“Mrs. Moreau did go through an incredibly tragic event only a few weeks ago. It’s not surprising that her demeanor isn’t as upbeat as usual.” Dr. Carmichael made me smile with his tone of voice. He sounded like a father reprimanding his daughters for behaving like silly girls. “She just needs time. But we will take your concerns into consideration and keep an eye on her. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

Maybe my friends were right to be worried about me, but at the time I didn’t care. Having overheard their conversation with my doctor when they thought I was sleeping planted a tiny seed of resentment in my heart that I couldn’t dislodge. Who were they to act like I was a difficult child who needed to be put in her place? They had no idea what it was like to lose the person they loved most in the entire world. They made sure I knew that every time they brought their significant others with them.

I didn’t know it until then, and I suppose no one really does until it happens to them, but there’s a definite line between people who have lost a loved one and the ones who haven’t. The latter try to tell the former how to deal with it, but they don’t know. Not really. They want you to pick yourself up and be happy again in a time frame that suits them. They don’t want you to bum them out anymore. They don’t understand the chasm it cuts into the very essence of who you are, and how you will grieve forever.

That night, after my friends had all gone back home to sit around and talk about how terrible it was for poor Blaire that she was alone now, Dr. Carmichael stopped by my room. He’d been at the hospital for two days straight by that point, and I was half expecting him to tell me my second doctor would be in soon.

“How are we tonight, Blaire?” He asked. The flipping of the pages on my chart seemed so loud in the dark, quiet night that they might as well have been hooked up to an amplifier. “Results from your last cat-scan are good. There doesn’t seem to be any residual swelling—”

“I don’t want my friends to visit anymore.”

He stopped flipping pages.

“Why is that?”

“I heard what Danielle and Kelly said to you. That I’m not myself anymore.” I tightened my grip on my blanket, staring out the open window into the glittering city. A city that now felt like a tomb. “And, frankly, I’d rather not have to deal with them.”

Dr. Carmichael walked around the bed so that he was in her field of vision. He certainly looked like a man that had been awake for two days. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I just don’t want them around anymore.”

“Well, I’ll admit it was a bit presumptuous of them to think you would be one-hundred percent yourself right away—”

“No, you’re not hearing me.” I sat up, probably for the first time in a long time. “I’m exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping—and when I do sleep, I keep dreaming about what happened and I wake up in a cold sweat every time. I don’t have it in me to take care of them right now.”

“What makes you think you need to take care of them?”

“Come on, you saw them. They want me to feel better right now because I’m bumming them out. They don’t have a single idea of what I’m going through. They care—I know they do—but most days it’s hard enough to keep myself alive. I don’t need their pressure on me. I know that deep down, they feel the same way I do.”

“And what way is that?”

“That I should’ve died too. That there’s no reason for me to be alive when Gabriel isn’t.”

My first mistake was treating Dr. Carmichael like my friend. He wasn’t my friend. I should have known not to tell him, though in not so many words, that every day was a struggle to not kill myself. I wasn’t even fully aware that I felt that way until I said the words, then once I heard them out loud in my own voice I knew deep down that they were unequivocally true. There was literally no reason at all that I should’ve survived and not my husband. Maybe Death missed me at the scene of the accident, and was now just waiting on the fringes for an opportunity to finish the job.

After staring at me for a long time, his brain silently working my words through the system, Dr. Carmichael wrote on my file. “I’m going to see about prescribing you some anti-depressants, and I’m going to have the hospital psychiatrist come speak with you. In the meantime, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to deny your friends visitation. Right now more than ever, I feel like you need a strong support system.”

Just like that, Dr. Carmichael was back to being all business. I don’t know why I thought he was my friend. I don’t know why I thought it would be okay to tell him all I really wanted right then was to die. I should’ve known better.



All four of my friends and Gabriel’s family were present the day I went home. I didn’t get out in time to attend Gabriel’s funeral but they told me all about it in excruciating detail. Apparently, it was a beautiful service. Lots of azaleas and daisies—his sister Francine’s favorites—a little boy from the church choir sang “Morning Has Broken” so beautifully that it brought the entire church to tears, including the pastor. I would have gone home sooner (though still not in time for the funeral) but my bought of honesty with Dr. Carmichael bought me a few more weeks meeting with the hospital psychiatrist and a prescription for Paroxetine.

Gabriel’s family came in a few days before the funeral and stayed at our place. The moment I stepped back into my house I saw that his mom, Janine, and his two younger sisters Francine and Julie, had taken it upon themselves to deep-clean my house. They packed up everything that could possibly remind me of Gabriel—pictures of us, his clothes, his drafting stuff, everything. If I was in a better head space I probably would have been grateful for it. They saved me the pain of doing it myself, because it had to be done. But instead I was overcome with a great, intense wave of anger that I was barely able to control. They were trying to erase him from my life. Their motives were hardly important.

They were all so happy that I was home. Everyone bustled around me to get things set up, to show me how well they cleaned, to make sure I had everything I needed. I caught my friends looking at my face a few times like they used to—only to recoil slightly when they remembered I had large black stitches holding together the gashes all over my face. Then they would tear their gaze away from me as if it nauseated them to see me like that.

I excused myself to go upstairs, telling them I wanted to take a shower. But instead of going to the shower right away, I stopped by my office and opened the top of my laptop. After putting in the unlock password, I realized I left it with my current novel up waiting to have the edits finished. I looked at my email next: lots of messages from the book tour company asking over and over again to finalize the date with them. I couldn’t because I was in the hospital the whole time, and because I didn’t they had to cancel and give my slot to someone else. I was surprised to find that this didn’t bother me in the least bit.

My mind was in a soupy fog when I brought my novel back up. I closed it out completely, then found its file on the flash drive. I clicked on it, dragged it over to the trashcan on my desktop, and dropped it in.

Then, I emptied the trash can and it was gone.  

Next Chapter: Chapter Two