We all laughed, but Julie and Iris had both touched on something here. Whether it was true or not, one anonymous Instagram account was shaping the reality of our entire town. We could use it for good, or we could use it for evil. Julie’s plan was the perfect kind: a little bit of both.

Alice Frozen in Time

People say you regret the things you didn’t do, not the things you did. Those people don’t understand real, true regret. Because those things you never did? You can’t know the outcome. Didn’t go to Hollywood? Well, maybe you would have made it. But you probably would have come home with credit card debt and the bitterness of broken dreams.

But see, those people who say I’m a murderer… well, they aren’t entirely wrong. I was the one who wanted to go on that ski trip, to learn a sport that had seemed so foreign and exotic to me. But Jeremy was the one who, in his years of experience, took the gondola to the top of the mountain. Jeremy was the one who got caught in that avalanche. Three years of marriage. Three tiny, precious, precarious years when we were twenty-four to twenty-seven where things were perfect. Three perfect years when it didn’t matter that his parents didn’t want him with someone like me, someone lost and abandoned and orphaned. Someone who never had the opportunity to go to college, much less graduate. When it didn’t matter that I didn’t come from money like he did, didn’t have a family name like he did.

Jeremy became frozen in time for me, in the honeymoon stage, when it was the two of us against the world. The two of us and a love so big that it would make your heart burst.

I think a part of me realizes that my memories of him aren’t totally real, that the time we had together seems so perfect because our love was so young, so untainted. But also because I was so young. The Alice I was when I was with Jeremy was so much less afraid of the world. But, whatever the reason, he is still who I see when I close my eyes, whose breath I feel when I’m in that moment right before sleep when the world goes hazy but not all the way dark.

His parents tried to ruin that image for me. As we sat around a shining wooden conference table in their lawyer’s office, his mother pointed at me and said, “She killed him. This is her fault!”