Page 4 of Before We Were

His words echo now, bittersweet and sharp as broken glass. He was right—when a moment's gone, it's gone forever. Memories don't stay neatly contained; they ebb and flow like tides, dragging you into seas of either joy or sorrow. Loss sharpens their edges, turns even the happiest memories into weapons that cut when you least expect it. The moments we lose hurt because they remind us how precious they were to begin with.

My throat tightens, tears pricking my eyes, but I blink them back.

My gaze drifts to the floor—the exact spot where I found him. My feet are rooted, frozen in place. And just like that, I'm back there again.

Eight days ago.

My voice calling his name as I walked through the door, receiving only silence in return. The casual push of the spare living room door revealing what my mind still struggles to process.

Dad on the floor, unnaturally still. Time suspends as my brain frantically tries to make sense of the scene—this can't be happening—but my body understands immediately. My knees buckle. My lungs forget how to draw breath. My hand reaches for my phone while some distant part of me is already screaming.

I don't remember dialing 911, just fragments of my own voice—broken, desperate—explaining what I've found. The operator's calm instructions seem to come from another universe while I kneel beside him, touching his hand, still warm but wrong.

Behind me, Mom appears in the doorway. Her gasp slices through the room before morphing into a sound I'll never forget—not quite a scream, not quite a sob, but something primal that echoes the exact shattering I feel inside.

Ollie arrives next, summoned by the commotion. He crumples to the floor, whispering prayers to a God he never believed in before this moment.

The paramedics burst in—a blur of uniforms and equipment. Hands on my shoulders pull me back. "Let us try to save him," a voice says, but something in their tone tells me they already know.

My body trembles as I watch them work, going through motions that seem increasingly futile with each passing second. I stand there, holding Mom up as she shakes against me, both of us suspended between hope and the terrible truth my body already knows.

He's gone.

The memory releases me and I'm back in the present, staring at that same spot, now empty but somehow still the center of a universe that collapsed eight days and eight centuries ago.

I shake myself from the memory, trying to claw my way back to the present. The late afternoon sun filters through the library's shutters, painting streaks of gold across Dad's desk. Summer has arrived, its warmth usually a promise of freedom and laughter. But not this year. This year, it feels like a cruel joke.

The counselors Mom forced me to see said grief comes in stages, as if it's a process you can check off like a to-do list for heartbreak. Five neat little boxes to tick: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But they don't tell you how these stages crash into each other like waves, how you can feel all of them at once until you're drowning.

They said I'm strong, resilient, and a survivor.

What they don't understand is that surviving isn't a choice.

It's instinct.

Like breathing when your lungs are on fire or clawing at the surface when you're drowning. It doesn't feel brave. It feels relentless.

Because finding Dad will go down as one of the worst days of my life. But the hardest?

That was twelve days ago.

The day something inside me shattered beyond repair. The day I became a ghost inside my own body.

The irony doesn't escape me—I was already mourning one death when another came to claim what little remained of me. Dad never knew about those darkest hours, about what happened that night.

How could he? I became an expert at smiling through fractured places, at carrying wounds no one could see.

The weight of untold truths clings to me like a second skin—dark and suffocating. Secrets are their own kind of grief—slow, corrosive, isolating. They carve you up piece by piece until you're not sure who's left. They leave you stranded in a loneliness no one else can see.

Now I stand in the doorway of two separate hells. One I can share—the public grief of a daughter who found her father—and one I carry alone, a private devastation no one suspects lies beneath.

But still, you move forward. Because you have to.

Tomorrow will come, indifferent and unyielding. Life will go on, dragging you with it whether you're ready or not.

It won't be the same.

It'll never be the same.

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