She couldn’t even think about his… funeral. She would have to put him in the cold, hard ground, alone. Abandoned. And where had she been while he’d lain there dying? Safely tucked up in bed. She hadn’t even waited up for him. She assumed that he’d been with Justin and Wade, safe.

Maggie spoke, her voice carrying down the short hallway.

‘But why? Why did they crash? What happened, Billy?’ Her voice broke as she asked the question, and she imagined that Billy had laid a comforting hand on her arm.

‘The police said that Justin swerved to miss a deer, but they ran off the road and into a tree.’ Billy paused, then kept talking. Vanessa clung to the doorframe for support, knowing that she couldn’t hold herself up without help. She could have called for help, but she needed to hear the rest of the story. Billy might water it down for her, to protect her, but he was being straight with Maggie. ‘When they hit the tree, Wren wasn’t wearing his seatbelt. He went through the front window.’

‘Oh God,’ Maggie gasped.

‘He had a broken eye socket, a fractured skull, broken neck, and deep lacerations on his arms and torso. He… he lost an arm too.’ Billy rattled off the litany of injuries her baby had suffered.

Maggie began to cry, mirroring exactly what Vanessa was doing. She turned away from the conversation and her crying best friend, wanting nothing more than to die right along with her son. Before she closed the door, she heard Billy say, ‘They don’t know if he died right away. He could have lived, seconds maybe, but those few seconds…’ His words choked off.

Those few seconds must have felt like years to him. The agony he must have been in.

Vanessa laid down, hollow-eyed from grief. She couldn’t cry anymore; her tears were trapped behind a wall made of glass. Billy opened the door quietly and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Ness? We need to tell Ty what’s going on. Please, he needs his mom there too.’ Billy didn’t often beg but he was now.

It was the last thing she wanted to do. Talk about Wren’s death. It was so fucking raw and she was exhausted. It was the longest night of her life and it stretched before her like an eternal highway of hell. Billy put his arm behind her back and lifted her up.

‘I can’t,’ she whispered.

‘You still have another son to take care of,’ he said quietly. Vanessa thought it insensitive and she glared at him. If he noticed, he didn’t react.

‘I can’t, you’ll have to… tell him. I just can’t, Billy.’

He looked down at his lap for a moment. ‘He’s going to be devastated. He idolizes Wren.’