Chapter 1
Everything felt hazy, as if she were looking through a fog. Her vision and memory were broken into fragments—flashes of crimson, the swirl of red and blue lights, distorted voices. She was hurried into a room, laid on a bed, and then everything slipped away.
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Bright light burned her eyes when she woke. Doctors were moving around her, checking her, speaking in quick, clipped sentences. She tried to focus, but nothing made sense. Why was she in a hospital? She had been heading home from work, expecting her husband and children to pick her up.
Her last memory came in pieces: her children, five and seven, laughing in the back seat, talking about Tom and Jerry, telling stories about school. Her husband smiled, joining in, holding her hand.
Then it all went wrong. The accident.
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She asked where her family was. The doctors’ words were calm, but they didn’t reach her. Panic rose, sharp and suffocating. She screamed, begged, demanded to know.
Finally, one doctor’s face hardened with the weight of the truth. She had been unconscious for two days after surgery. The crash was caused by a drunk driver. Her husband had died trying to shield her and the children. Her younger child had died the same day. The older one lasted only a day before slipping away.
She froze. Every sense screamed, but no tears came. Nothing could process it.
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Later, at the mortuary, she faced the bodies, numb. Identification. No tears yet. Until the cloths were lifted. Then everything broke.
Her husband’s bruised face, the man who dramatized even minor scrapes but loved them fiercely, stared at her. Her older child, once commanding and tender, lay still. Her youngest, a mirror of her husband’s warmth and laughter, was gone. She sank to her knees, screaming from the heart of her loss.
She wished it were a prank. That the children would wake, hug her, and laugh, whispering that it had all been their father’s plan, a prank on her. But it wasn’t. Cold, still, bruised.
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And then the unbearable question: who was to blame? The intoxicated driver? Her family for the drive home? Herself, for surviving?
