Night, Night Mr. Best Seller, snapped into his mind, and he wasn’t sure if it was Orelia’s voice or just his imagination.

71

Nem felt her body become weightless. Her entire being became an empty balloon, free and floating. She tried to reach up to the sky, which had become the most incredible white she’d ever seen. Pure and sparkling, the way light glances off a lake in the early afternoon when the sun is high.

She reflected on William and how they’d once been friends. Well, working acquaintances, the only style of friendship she allowed herself. Or maybe that wasn’t true. She had a vague feeling she had loved someone once and cared for others but that she couldn’t stay with them because—

Why she had decided to only create those relationships, she couldn’t fathom. When she tried to form an image of the one she loved, it flew out of reach.

Now he had the book, her mother’s book, the one she shouldn’t have touched; she hoped he might enjoy better luck with it. That idea made her want to laugh and she couldn’t think why? It was as if there was an inside joke and she just didn’t get it.

Confusion drifted into her thoughts, jumbling what she thought she knew, stretching memories away like elastic, so she didn’t have time to understand and put the pieces together. Good fortune had been hers, but somehow it evaporated and left her for another place. Another person. A different life.

She tried to focus on that concept but found her mind straying to other unimportant ideas and then they faded and wafted into the air to disappear.

Her attention returned to the sky. An incredible, brilliant glow shone down upon her, warming her face, and she didn’t want to miss the glorious vision. She wanted to remember this for the rest of her life as a reminder of beauty that money can’t buy.

Despite being soaked from the rain and bone-chilled moments before, she now enjoyed the luxurious bath of incandescence, which radiated from the shining circle above.

She had just begun to wonder about the brilliance and why it was there, when the lightness reached for her, wrapping around her body like a glove of softest silk. A feeling of being lifted to the heavens and gliding on air overtook her. She gave herself to the sensation because this was the most wonderful experience of her life.

Even though, as she drew near the glow grew whiter and brighter, but it didn’t hurt her eyes. That was strange because she didn’t even blink, and she should have with all this vivid whiteness flooding over her.

Then the luminescence engulfed her, and she finally understood. For a millisecond, sorrow consumed her for what she’d done. The cruelness, the selfishness, the disregard for everyone and the anger she’d carried for so long toward her mom.

Someone called her name off in the distance.

She turned her body, her now strange light-as-air body, toward the sound. Maybe she could ask that voice what had happened. Where she had gone wrong? That seemed important to know, now she was here.