She was angry and hurt so much so that it felt like an enormous hole had opened up inside her. A large, empty vacant lot. She noticed this space, felt it now because of what it no longer contained. Like being untethered, drifting, terrifyingly free, as if nothing were holding her to the earth anymore.

She had lost something. It was huge, it was everything, and it was gone. Forever it was gone. She knew that, and pain that had nothing to do with her physical body broke open in her heart and spread through her like liquid ice.

Sorrow, a deep well of abandon, her own destruction—she felt it, trapped inside a body that wasn’t working. “What happened?” she tried to scream, but not even her voice functioned.

Someone was holding her arms. She felt more hands on her shins. Then two hands, large and soft and familiar, cupped her face and tried to keep her from thrashing her head. Clare turned her lips against the woman’s palm. She knew these hands, the weight of them, the scent.

“Mom?” she whispered against the fingers.

Her mother’s face was next to hers, cheek to cheek. Her mother stroked her forehead, then her hair, trying in the ways she always had to comfort, hush, soothe.

Where was she? What was happening?

What had happened?

All she could remember was the sound of her shoes in the gravel as she ran for Adam’s truck, the music from the party in the distance, the wind rushing through the tall cottonwoods lining the road leading to the Robertses’ ranch, and Adam calling after her.

Three months after Heather Roberts’s graduation party, Clare opened her eyes in the Cheyenne Regional Medical Center to a life she now barely recognized. She had pressed and prodded and pushed her brain again and again through that night, the days and weeks that led up to it, and even the painful details of seeing…

But no matter how many times she went over it, her memory ended with her running down that dirt road.

It was a movie that faded to black before her eyes. Frustrating her over and over because the next images were there. She could feel them, skimming just beyond the grasp of her neural reach, devastating because they were the last moments of her old life, the minutes that changed everything forever.

She ran down that dirt road, and Adam called after her to stop. Faster, stronger than she was—he was going to catch up to her.

Then she opened her eyes.