Eventually, her eyesight began to focus, her hearing cleared up, and her throat, sore from being on a ventilator for over twelve weeks, was able to scratch out the most rudimentary of sounds. Her mother and Eileen took turns at her bedside, shaking their heads to her notepad full of the same scrawled questions. What happened? Where is Adam? Until finally, three days later, she was able to vocalize the questions she needed answered, and they could no longer avoid the facts. Her mother sat at the side of her bed, took hold of her hands, and whispered the horrible truth.

“Clare, there was an accident.” Her mother stared into her eyes, waiting, watching Clare absorb this information before pressing on. “Do you remember anything?” Her gaze broke from Clare’s as Ella shifted her eyes to their hands clasped on the bed between them. “Do you remember anything about the accident?”

Clare stared at her mother, scrutinizing her expression, her every facial muscle, looking for something she couldn’t put her finger on. “No,” she croaked. Clare cleared her throat and tried again. “No. We were at Heather’s party and… ” Clare stopped talking. She had seen them and had run. “I left,” she finished. “I don’t remember an accident.”

Her mother, still not meeting her eyes, nodded her head. “Try for a second, please. Think. You were in Adam’s truck. What do you remember before the wreck?”

Clare shook her head. “Running away from the party. I wanted to leave. That’s it. That’s all I remember.” Frustrated, Clare shook her head hard, and a desperate sob rose up and filled her chest. There was all this empty space inside her now. So much loss where she once felt complete and whole. She was afraid of what her mother would say next while also already knowing, somehow, exactly what this hole inside her meant.

“Honey, I need you to really—”

“Tell me now! I told you, I don’t remember. Please,” she sobbed. “Just tell me!”

That was when her mother raised her eyes and squeezed her hand. She nodded. “That night, after you left Heather’s party, Adam wrecked his truck off Old Round Road. About a mile from Heather’s house, the truck was found at the bottom of the embankment just past where the road crosses the North Platte. It drops down…” Her mother paused, swallowing down her own emotion. “The truck rolled five or six times. They think he was driving pretty fast. His blood alcohol was over two… Yours was…higher.” Her mother stopped talking.

Clare turned her head and looked at her sister sitting in the chair pushed into the far corner of the room, her head hung, hands folded in her lap.

Clare turned back to her mother. “Where is he?”

“Clare…”