Then…

My phone clatters to the ground, and the smiling faces of Hermione and Luna stare up at me from the back of my Harry Potter phone case. I exhale, and as the breath leaves me, so does part of my soul. I close my eyes, refusing to process what I just heard.

Time stops, yet everything is swirling around me at a dizzying rate. Panic rises in my chest, and my knees threaten to buckle. A strangled sob escapes my lips and I pitch forward, catching myself on the counter. Tears burn behind my closed eyelids, and I’m struggling to breathe.

“Sierra? Are you all right?” Mrs. Williams’ voice comes from behind me, sounding miles away as if it’s echoing through a dark and harrowing tunnel. She’s only a few yards to my right, putting a new shipment of children's books away on a display. “Sierra?” she calls again and the floorboards of this little, old bookstore creak beneath her feet. “Honey, what’s wrong?” There’s a bit of panic in her voice, but she does her best to hide it.

“Jake,” I whisper, and the tears start to fall. “Jake…”

Mrs. Williams picks up my phone. There’s a fresh crack down the middle, but I don’t care right now. It’s just a phone. It can be replaced. She carefully puts it to her ear and says something, and then listens to what the liar on the other end has to say.

I want to swat the phone out of her hand. I want it to fall and break into a million pieces on the cold, hard ground. Because none of it is true.

It can’t be true.

Jake can’t leave me.

The blood drains from Mrs. Williams’ face. She nods as she talks, then lowers the phone. “Sierra,” she says softly, voice full of pity. Her hand lands on my back and if I weren’t frozen still, I’d jerk away. I don’t need sympathy. Because that means something is wrong. That means something bad happened.

And nothing did.

Things are good.

I’m good.

Jake’s good.

We’re good.

“I’ll drive you to the hospital.”

The panic is back and everything inside me aches. I need to be there. Now. “The store,” I start, brain going into survival mode. It’s only me and Mrs. Williams running this place, and we have our first customer of the morning in right now, shyly flipping through a dirty romance novel.

“The store can wait,” Mrs. Williams says gently. “We won’t miss too many sales anyway.” She gives me a small smile, eyebrows pinched together with worry. “Come on, honey, grab your purse.”

I blink and realize that tears are streaming down my face like rain. I can’t make them stop. My chest tightens when I turn, and all I can do to keep from coming apart is to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. I make it into the little room in the back and take my purse from the hook. There’s no air conditioning back here, and the humidity is high today, normal for late spring in Mississippi. The world spirals around me and the liar’s words echo through my head.

There was an accident.

I’m sorry.

We’ve done all that we can do.

There’s not much time left.

Hurry if you want to say goodbye.

“Sierra?” Mrs. Williams calls. I can hear her keys jingling in rhythm with her limp as she hurries to the back. The weather makes her bad hip hurt. “Come on, honey.”

I look down at my sunshine-yellow ballet flats, tears blurring my vision. Forcing myself to go numb, I follow Mrs. Williams out the back of the store and get in the passenger side of her car.

The fully restored 1971, cherry-red Chevelle that’s detailed to hell with rims so shiny you can see them from space is the last thing you’d expect an eighty-something-year-old woman to be driving. But those who know Mrs. Williams know restoring old cars to perfection was her husband’s hobby that turned into his career. She has a garage full of these things, and she and her son take great care of them.

I stare straight ahead at the dash, not allowing myself to think. Or feel.

But I do.

My mind goes back to how it all began, to that first night I saw Jake at a party in college. He was drunk and had his hands all over some blonde with boobs pushed up to her chin. Yet for some reason, he left her and wanted to talk to me. I thought he was a pig. He asked me out and I told him no.

After a bit of a cat-and-mouse game of him asking me out and me telling him no, things changed when he kissed me on my birthday, and we’ve been together for nearly two years now. I moved back home to Summer Hill after graduating college, working to save for grad school and waiting for Jake to finish his residency and become a doctor.

We’re nearly an hour away from the hospital, and each bump in the road, each mile that passes, makes things feel more real. I curl my fingers into the leather seat beneath me, eyes wide and jaw tense. My heart is beating so fast it hurts, with each beat echoing loudly in my ears.

They’re wrong. Jake is going to be fine. I can’t lose him. I won’t lose him.

Not a word is spoken on the way to the hospital. Mrs. Williams stops at the front and suddenly I can’t move. My fingers won’t work to open the door. My legs are lead and are much too heavy.

“Do you want me to come with you?” she asks.

My jaw begins to tremble and I shake my head. “I don’t know.” I blink and the sight of the large, brick building takes my breath away all over again. Vomit rises in my throat and the panic comes back in a fury. Without another word, I get out of the car and rush to the desk in the ER.

“Hi, how can I help you?” a young girl asks with a smile that slowly disappears from her face when she takes in my desperation.

“Jake. Jake McLeland,” I start, voice trembling. “I got a call that he was…” I can’t finish the sentence. The girl behind the desk nods and types something into the computer. Her face softens more when she reads whatever the file is telling her. She grabs a phone and calls for an attendant to take me to the ICU.

Everyone looks at me with pity. Smiles gently. Talks softly. Like they’re afraid I’ll break at any moment. But if what they say is true, I’m already broken.

The smell hits me first. It’s a typical hospital smell: a mixture of disinfectant, ointments, and blood. I know it doesn’t make sense. There aren’t pools of blood left to fester, yet it’s what I smell. The lighting gets to me next. The waiting area is dark, contrasted by harsh lights in the nurses’ station and over the patients’ beds.

I’m directed to a room at the end of the ICU. Curtains are drawn around the glass walls and it hits me; there’s no need for the nurses to be able to look in on Jake. It’s that moment that defines me, that moment when I know I’ve lost my faith.

And I haven’t even seen Jake yet.

Unsteady, my legs shake. My fingers tremble and I reach up to the cat charm hanging from my necklace, rubbing my thumb over the smooth metal. It’s a nervous habit, but the gesture brings no comfort.

A nurse comes to greet me. Her eyes are gentle, and she explains things to me like it makes sense. Like anything makes sense. I look up at her, wondering how she’s able to do this day after day. How’s she’s able to say things like ‘no brain activity’ and ‘unstable blood pressure’ without breaking down herself.

She puts her arm around my shoulder and opens the door. The sight of Jake, my sweet Jake, lying motionless in the bed, hooked up to more IVs and wires than I can count, with tubes in his mouth and his neck in a brace, sends me backward into a dark spiral of despair I know I’ll never be able to claw my way out of.

Tears fall from my eyes and everything inside me breaks. I go to Jake, taking his hand. His skin is cold.

The beeping from the heart monitor isn’t rhythmic. Isn’t steady. It’s nowhere near the rate it should be. His heart beats once for every three of mine, but that’s okay. I’ll give him my strength. My heart is already his.

“I’m not sure what your beliefs are,” the nurse softly says. “But a lot of people believe the soul or spirit remains until the last heartbeat. He might still be able to hear you.”

Words meant to comfort me bring on an icy chill, and I collapse onto the bed, unable to control my sobs.

The last heartbeat.

“Jake,” I cry, lacing my fingers between his. An IV tube gets in the way, but I ignore it. “Jake, please don’t leave me. Don’t leave. Please.”

I wrap my other arm around him and rest my head on his chest. Instead of the warm comfort of his muscles, he feels stiff and cold, covered in wires. Faintly, I can smell his cologne underneath the stench of hospital that’s stained his skin.

“You can’t leave me,” I sob. “We’re not done yet, remember? You left me a message this morning about finally putting in that garden.” I press my head into him, crying harder than I ever have before. “And the cat shelf,” I say, looking up at him. He’s going to open his eyes and laugh at me. Any second now, he’ll tell me I’m crazy for wanting to install a row of shelves along the ceiling in the loft for the cats. “We still have to put up the cat shelf.”

I swallow the lump in my throat and wipe my tears.

“Come on, baby. I know it hurts. But you can do this. You can fight this. Please, don’t go. You can fight this, I know it.”

But he doesn’t. His eyes don’t open. His fingers don’t twitch. The beeps from the heart monitor grow further apart.

“Jake!” I call, shaking his hand. Tears stream down my face and fall onto him. I lift his arm and put his hand over my heart. “Take mine! Take anything you need. Take it all. Please…please, baby.” I hang my head, sobbing.

A hand lands on my shoulder. “Your mother is on her way,” Mrs. Williams says. She stays there, hand on my shoulder until the nurse comes back in, asking if we had more contact information for Jake. Always prepared, Jake had the proper documents folded and kept in his wallet that listed me as his emergency contact and power of attorney if need be. Seeing situations just like this in the ER made him prepare for the worst.

The worst wasn’t supposed to happen.

Mrs. Williams leaves the room to help the nurse get Jake’s mom’s number. I hug Jake tighter, willing him to come back to me.

“I’m not going to give up on you,” I whisper through my tears. “You can pull through this. I know you can. I love you so much.”

The heart monitor gives off a series of rapid beats. I shoot up and look at it. The line spiked three times. Oh my God. He’s coming back.

“Jake, baby!”

I wait. Come on…come on…

But nothing comes.

Nothing, except the last heartbeat.

* * *

My house is on our family’s property, same as my sister’s, but unlike hers, mine isn’t new. It’s the original Belmont farmhouse, the one all nine of my ancestors crammed into when they first took up farming and made a name for themselves. It’s not fancy like the historic plantation house my parents reside in. It has no ostentatious facade, no grand staircase or granite kitchen island big enough to seat a dozen people.

It’s small yet quaint, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You can feel the history when you walk in, pressing on you from all sides of the brick house. The necessary updates have been done to make the space livable, of course. The entire first floor is modernized, with the latest update being a total kitchen remodel that Jake and I did ourselves this past Christmas. Well, mostly ourselves. And by that, I mean I picked out farmhouse kitchens on Pinterest and he approved the final design. We ripped out the old cabinets and let the professionals take it from there.

Walking into the house alone isn’t out of the norm. Jake stayed at school most weeknights when he was taking classes, and now that he is—was—in his residency, the drive to the teaching hospital was just too far to take on a daily basis. But this time, when I stick my key into the deadbolt, the weight of the world crashes down on me.

Jake will never walk through these doors again. I’ll never wake up in the middle of the night to a call from him, telling me he loves me or filling me in on the nightshift drama at the hospital. Some nights I’d be too dead asleep to hear the phone ring, the curse of a sound sleeper, I suppose, and would wake up to a wonderful message. I’d call him on my way into The Book Bag and leave him a message to listen to as well when he got done with his rotation in the ER.

I’ll never see his name on my phone again.

I’ll never hear his voice again.

Feel his arms around me.

Get annoyed with him for putting plastic in the garbage instead of the recycling.

I step into the house and a wave of grief washes over me, pulling me under the surface. I’m caught in the undertow and there’s no way out. And right now, I don’t want a way out. I’m drowning, but once the water fills my lungs, everything will end.

I make it to the couch and fall, curling up into a little ball. I bring my knees to my chest, pressing against my heart. It hurts so much I can feel it in my bones. I cry and cry and cry until there are no more tears left to fall.

And then I cry some more.

“Sierra?”

“Mom,” I choke out, looking up. The house is too dark, and my eyes are too swollen to see, but I know her voice. She comes to the couch and sits next to me. Doesn’t turn on a light. Doesn’t tell me things will be okay. She just holds me and lets me cry. She cries too, both over the loss and over my heartache. She stays with me until I fall asleep, and is there when the early light of the morning filters through the windows. My dreams of Jake kissing me escape me, leaving me naked and cold in harsh reality.

My heart, mended in my sleep by dreams that will never come true, rips in two again. The break is so deep it vibrates through my entire being, bringing pain to my whole body. My head throbs. My throat is sore and thick from crying. My eyes burn. My stomach is sick. Yet nothing is as bad as the heartache. The pain intensifies, and I feel like I’m dead too, yet they forgot to bury me.

Yesterday, my world ended. I lost Jake yesterday. Yesterday. And waking up, remembering it all, it’s like I lost him all over again.

It’s going to be like this every day for the rest of my life.

* * *

My sister grips my hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze as she opens the door to my little brick house. I’ve been staying with my parents the last week, just trying to survive. I feel like I’ve failed, yet here I am, still breathing. Heart still beating. My body is betraying me. I want it to give out and let the quiet peace of death surround me, taking me into the dark where I can be with Jake again.

But I’m still here.

“The cats are fine,” Samantha tells me, opening the door. “I came by every day to feed them and I scooped their box a few times too. You had a load of laundry in your washer that got a bit stinky from sitting there, so I rewashed it and put it in the dryer. And I loaded your dishwasher.”

I nod and for the first time am thankful for my older sister’s no-nonsense personality. Today is Jake’s funeral, and she’s come to the house with me to pick out clothes. Sam closes the door behind me, and my cats come running. I drop down and run my hand over a pretty calico cat who’s purring and pressing her head against me. Tinkerbell, a gray and black tabby, meows and twists around my arm.

“Hey, girls,” I whisper, voice shaking. Everything is the same. The house looks like it did that night. Smells the same. But it’s so very different. This house is no longer a home.

“Do you want me to pick something out for you?” Sam offers.

“I don’t care.”

“Okay. I’ll bring options.”

Dolly, the calico cat, nips at me as she demands more attention. I had her before I met Jake. He wasn’t much of an animal person, but he tolerated the cats for my sake. And it was him who brought home Tinkerbell, and the memory of him coming in the door with a little wet ball of fur makes me choke up. He found her shivering in a puddle along the driveway to our house, no doubt separated from its mother and littermates from the large barn behind my parents’ mansion.

“Do you want me to do your makeup?” Sam asks, voice coming from the bedroom.

“I don’t care,” I repeat. It’s been one of the few things I’m able to say. Because I don’t care. Clothes…makeup…what to eat for dinner…I don’t care. It’s all so trivial.

Both cats are meowing now, and I know they want treats. Using the coffee table to pull myself up, I shuffle into the kitchen to get them. I toss them on the floor, watching the cats playfully chase after them. Going on autopilot, I wash out their water bowl, refill their dry food, and open a can of cat food to split between the two. Then I go into my bedroom, eyes going to the bed that Jake and I shared.

He’ll never be in it again.

I’ll never wake up to his arms around me.

He’ll never complain about me sticking my cold feet under his legs to warm them up.

The bed is made, and I want to get mad at Sam for messing it up. She should have left it how it was, though it’s not like Jake woke up that morning. He hadn’t been home in over a week, going on a long stretch at the teaching hospital we joked he was temporarily married to.

I don’t remember what he was wearing the last time I saw him. I had the day off and was still in bed, half asleep, when he left. He kissed me goodbye and said he’d call later, which he always did. Two days went by just like normal, and then…tears are back in my eyes, and it’s a wonder I’m not dehydrated from crying so much.

The clothes I wore that day are still on the floor, hastily strewn about. The yellow skirt, blue tank top, and a red headband, stand out against the dark hardwood floor, reminding me how fast things can change. I got dressed that morning in an outfit that vaguely resembled Snow White, and went to work like my life would continue to coast along like normal.

“What about this?” Sam holds up a black dress. “Oh, never mind, those are skulls. I thought it was just a design.” She frowns and puts it back, then thumbs through my clothes again. I make a move to the closet, about to tell her that I own exactly one appropriate dress, and the last time I wore it was for a job interview two years ago. I have what most call an ‘interesting’ fashion sense, but the way I see it, everyone else is way too boring. Clothes can be a way to express yourself, just as much as tattoos and makeup.

Then I see Jake’s side of the closet, with his clothes organized by color and type. It hits me hard, and it takes every last ounce of strength I have in me not to come undone. My sister looks at me, tears in her own eyes, and grabs the skull dress and a black sweater, and rushes over, wrapping her arms around me.

We cry together, and in that moment, I’ve never felt closer to my sister. She’s five years older than me and my polar opposite. She got her degree in agriculture, married a nice guy with a head for business and a background in farming, and popped out her first kid exactly ten months after their wedding. They’re set to take over the family farm, carrying on the Belmont traditions and doing exactly what they should.

I’m not good at following the path. I’ve been an outside-the-lines kind of person my whole life, which isn’t always easy in a small town, one whose rumor mill is bigger than the actual mill.

There were times when I was the only one marching to the beat of my own drum, and the loneliness got to me in moments of weakness. And then I found someone who loved me despite that, someone who supported my decision to follow my own dreams and not just go through the motions and become a farmer’s wife.

“I’ll help you get dressed.” Sam goes into the bathroom and returns with a brush. She combs through my long brunette hair before braiding it and then lays out my clothes. The black sweater is a slightly different shade of black than the dress, which would normally drive me crazy, but seeing them together makes me feel nothing at all.

I run my fingers over Jake’s pillow and then get dressed. Everything begins to feel surreal and time escapes me. Sam fills a black clutch full of tissues and takes my hand. We step outside into the bright sunlight and walk down the old stone path from my little porch to the gravel driveway, where the rest of our family is waiting in my dad’s black Escalade.

My brother Scott, who I only see on special occasions since he got an engineering job in Orlando a few years ago, welcomes me in a tight hug. I sit in the back of the SUV with him, and once we get going, he pulls out a silver flask and offers it to me.

I blink my tear-soaked eyes and take it from him, taking a big gulp. And then another. And another, until he takes it away from me. My body shudders in a sob and he puts his arm around me. I rest my head on his shoulder, trying to disassociate from everything for the hour-and-a-half-long drive it’s going to take to get to the cemetery.

I’ve been told that the grief will come in waves, and over time, the crash on the shore lessens. I’ll still feel the spray of the ocean, but it won’t feel like a constant battle to stay on land and not be washed out to sea. The only problem is, the waves haven’t started yet. I’m still in the middle of the sea with no land in sight, desperately treading water. My heart feels like it’s about to give out, that it can’t beat another beat because of the pain. So I stop. I become still. I welcome the cold darkness that wraps me up and pulls me below the surface.

And then I open my eyes and I’m above the surface again and have to go through the whole thing over and over again.

Dying, every single day.