Delaney James was wearing Chanel the night her husband told her he didn't love her anymore.
In an instant, her picture-perfect Manhattan life-complete with a brownstone on the Upper East Side, a blossoming career as a fashion journalist, and a devas...
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Death can do irrevocable damage to a person. It can hollow out parts of them they may never get back. But it can also make people take stock of their lives, reevaluate the choices they've made and the things they thought mattered, and sometimes, in the middle of all that grief, say things that sound a little crazy.
When we were seniors, one of our classmates, Brian Dwyer, died in a car accident. He was on his way to pick up his younger sister from a New Year's Eve party when a drunk driver crossed the center line and hit him head-on. His sister wasn't in the car, thank God, but Brian died on impact.
He never even saw it coming.
Brian wasn't a close friend of ours, but we'd all known him since sixth grade. We'd shared classrooms and lunch periods and school dances with him. His face had been one of those familiar constants you never thought much about until suddenly it wasn't there anymore.
His death affected all of us, but Greyson took it harder than anyone.
When I asked him why, he told me it was the first time he understood that he wasn't invincible. That none of us were. Until Brian died, death had been something distant, something that happened to grandparents and strangers on the news. Brian was seventeen. He had plans. He was going to college. He was doing something as ordinary as picking up his little sister, and then he was gone.
Greyson couldn't stop thinking about how easily it could have been one of us.
The night of Brian's funeral, we sat together in the sand at Dawson's Beach, bundled against the January chill. And Greyson made me promise that if anything ever happened to him, I would move on. I remember thinking he was being ridiculous. We were kids, and Greyson was sitting beside me, alive and warm and so certain that I needed to prepare myself for some impossible future without him.
But he wouldn't let it go.
He hooked his pinky around mine and made me swear that I would still have a life. That I would find a way to be happy.
So I promised him. Now, all these years later, I can't stop wondering if that promise still applies even though we're no longer together.
I've been on autopilot since the moment I heard the words comes out of my father's mouth.
You need to come home. For Greyson.
I don't remember packing. I barely remember the flight. I remember pieces of the drive from the airport, but not enough to string them together into anything coherent. Somehow, I ended up back in my childhood bedroom. Somehow, I showered and did my hair and put on makeup.
My body keeps doing what it's supposed to do while my mind refuses to cooperate.
