Over

Prologue

It was over as soon as it started.

The snow was, as usual for that time of the year, unbearably heavy but they still found the time to head out anyway because Mom was in a foul mood all day. She had been lounging around the house, sulking after more rounds of nitpicking on how the kids' grades had been slipping, on how their irregular waking hours made it hard for them to have family meals together and how nobody ever seemed to pick up any of the chores for her when she asked even though she was clearly exhausted from cooking. Ryan came up with the brilliant idea to have dinner at his favourite family restaurant which happened to be around the corner. Dad, expressed his disagreement after one look out the window, saying that the weather was too unfavourable. Mom, however, lit up at the suggestion and sat straight up at her armchair, pleading with him to let them out of the house this time, as they'd already been cooped up for days from all the snow. Isabelle was completely ambivalent about the entire thing, and stayed out of it even though Mom was egging her on to try and convince Dad. She eventually relented and said that it would've been nice to have a piping hot meal after spending the whole day freezing and buried in schoolwork. Dad's eyes softened and the decision was made. They began to prepare for a night out and headed out as soon as Dad shovelled the snow away from the car. They ate to their hearts' content at the family restaurant, chatting noisily away. Dad had wanted to head home early in case the weather made a turn for the worse but Isabelle insisted on some dessert, which he ordered for each of them in the end. When it was time to leave the restaurant, they were smiling like Cheshire cats, and approached the crosswalk which used to be a comforting sequence of black-white-black but was now a blanket of white.

Then it happened.

Ryan darted out to the road. The pedestrian lights were still red, but they thought nothing of it because he enjoyed crossing before it turned green but only after the lights for the traffic had turned red. He relished the idea of being one step ahead of other pedestrians and it was something they were used to. Then it struck Isabelle that the traffic lights were still green. She looked between the lights of the crosswalk and the traffic over and over again in horror, and called out for Ryan to stop, but her voice was drowned out by a deafening screech as a shower of snow flew skyward from the ground. The sickening crack of bone against metal rang out into the night as Ryan was thrown like a rag doll several metres away from the sedan that had skidded to a stop.

Mom shook her hand free from Isabelle's hand. She let out a sound that was so alien that it would come to haunt her dreams for years. She sped towards Ryan, collecting him into her arms. She shook him violently, as if that could will him to open his eyes. Dad pulled Isabelle closer to his side. He tried to control and hide his shaking from her at the same time. One of his hands wiped at her face, and she realised that she had been crying the entire time. She clutched tightly to his coat, hoping to wake up from the nightmare. The red bloomed from Ryan's body into the pale ice around them. He spurted some blood from his mouth that covered his whole face. A man stepped from the sedan and stumbled towards them but collapsed onto his knees before he could reach, his head buried in his hands as blood seeped through his fingers, with horror written all over his visage. Ryan jerked a few times and she could see hope showing through in her mother and the stranger's eyes. She shook him, calling his name again. She tried to remove the bloodstains from his face. Her sleeves were dripping with the blood of her child. Then his body stilled.

When the paramedics came, it took them one look and the loss was already plain in their eyes. The loss ended on that night for them, but for Isabelle's family, everything became either Before or After. She spent the rest of the year holed up in her bedroom, covering her ears as her parents screamed and yelled at each other for countless days and nights. They would quarrel over the same things over and over again, about how he shouldn't have let the family out that night, or how she shouldn't have been so adamant on heading out, and how Isabelle was only 7 and you were ruining everything and you should have died with Ryan that night. Whenever the fighting stopped and she could finally go to sleep, a fresh new hell began in the form of nightmares, where the dead bodies of her brother piled up to the sky and covered the sun, blocking all light that came from it. The noise only ended when Dad sent her mother the divorce papers and won custody of Isabelle in court while her mother wasted the days away alone, a bottle in her hand.

It took a few minutes for her brother to die that night. But her family died with him that same night. They were shattered into a million pieces that could never find their way back to one another again. And in the span of that time, five lives were also forever changed and set on different new paths that would eventually intersect.

This is their story.

(Head on over to my Inkitt to read the rest of this book! Link in bio.)