Page 82 of Life After You

I nod.

“Say it then.”

“Huh?” I blink at him.

“Say, ‘I am allowed to be happy.’”

I hesitate. “I’m allowed to be happy,” I mumble.

“Louder.”

I huff, feeling both ridiculous and a little angry, but I suck in a breath and yell it out to the universe.

“I’M ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY!”

“Damn straight you are.”

I am not going to cry. I take a few deep breaths, forcing myself to calm down.

Clay glances at me. “What were they like?”

His question catches me off guard. Feeling a little exposed, I answer honestly. “My dad was a bit of a doofus,” I say with a bitter smile. “He loved winding my mom up. He’d do this thing—” I snort, half sobbing as I go through the memory. “If she was cleaning, he’d start helping, but then he’d make a bigger mess right behind her just to piss her off. Like a cat knocking shit over.”

“What?” Clay laughs. “He sounds like a real character.”

“He was. But he also had endless patience. Braden and I could talk for hours about bugs, music, school—anything—and he’dlisten like it was the most interesting thing in the world. He was just happy. A happy person. Like my mom. They had their fights, sure, but they cared about each other.”

“They treated Logan like another son… They knew what happened. Or at least, they suspected.”

Clay’s voice softens. “Logan went through some shit, huh?”

I nod. “Yeah. We all have. It makes us who we are, right?”

“As someone training to be a general practitioner and not a psychologist, I can say that seems to be the case. We’re all just scar tissue beneath the smiles.”

I let out a bitter snort. “That was profound. And didn’t sound like a fortune cookie at all.”

Clay smirks. “Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.”

We laugh, lighthearted, moving through a crossing—

A screech of tires.

I don’t hear the impact. I feel it.

The world shatters.

I’m slammed against the door, glass exploding across me, slicing my skin. My skull cracks against the doorframe. Pain. A searing, blinding pain. Then the airbag detonates, burning my arm as it knocks me back. It saves me—but only for a second.

Another impact. The car spins. A sickening, twisting force whips me around as another vehicle slams into us from behind. We’re shoved forward, the seatbelt biting into my body, my lungs compressing.

Blue. Green. Gray. The world tilts.

We’re upside down.

My head smashes into something hard, glass digging into my scalp. The semi that hit us grinds against metal, a deep, hellish growl. The car is shrinking around me, crushing, squeezing—

A scream rips through the chaos. Raw. Terrified.

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