“No, where is Adam? Is he here?” She moved to get out of the bed, forgetting she was still hooked up to two IVs and strapped to a monitoring system that tracked her vitals.

Her mother stood up and grasped her shoulders with firm but gentle hands. “No, he’s not here. He…died, Clare. I was the one to find you. He died in the wreck. But you were still alive,” she cried. “Like a miracle, I found you thirty feet from where the truck was, still breathing, barely, but you were. You were alive.”

Clare stared at the white blanket covering her legs and tried to make sense of what her mother was saying.

“Do you have any idea how lucky you are to be alive?”

She felt numb, disconnected, surreal. None of this could really be happening. Adam wasn’t dead. He was going to Indiana to major in music and play basketball on TV. “There’s been some mistake,” she whispered.

Her mother sat back down. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But he’s gone.”

It was a hot day in mid-September when they released her from Cheyenne Regional. The trees clung to their wilted leaves, and the earth seemed to beg for the relief of fall rains and winter snow. The temperature gauge on the cruiser’s dash said it was ninety-eight degrees out; the backs of Clare’s legs burned when she slid onto the old, cracked leather of her mother’s patrol car. Beads of sweat rolled down Ella’s temples as she loaded the small duffel bag with the few belongings Clare was taking home with her from the hospital: her toothbrush and paste, a few changes of underwear, the plastic, kidney-shaped barf tray that Clare had come to depend on, magazines from the gift shop, stuffed animals from a few get-well-wishers, a tattered copy of Catcher in the Rye, and five slim journals that Clare had nearly filled from cover to cover in the last four weeks since she had woken up. She stared out the window and waited as her mother closed the trunk with a bang and got behind the wheel. Clare didn’t care about anything in that bag except the journals and the barf tray; she still sometimes had a hard time keeping food down.

“Ready?” Her mother looked over at her and gave her a weak smile as she turned the ignition key.

Clare nodded once, fastened her seat belt, and tried not to think about everything that would be different from now on. Her mother had been reluctant to offer up details, but when Clare had found herself alone with her sister, she had been able to pry the essentials out of Eileen.

“What are people saying about all this?”

“Everyone was pretty shocked, what, with it being Adam and all.”

“What do you mean?”