When The Daylight's Gone

Chapter One

Chapter One

"We just want to thank you guys again for coming out here for the thirtieth anniversary tonight..."

I decided then to tune Kevin out. Just for the moment. I love the guy, but when he gets emotional, he can go on and on. Practically for forever. April has been a month of mixed emotions during the past few years now and it always has me more often than not stuck in my own head. April is what brought me the group that absolutely saved my life. I wouldn't be here today if not for the fellas. I know that now. It was also the month that gave me my oldest child Odin.

It also reminded me of what I'd lost.

It'd been three and a half years since I lost Lauren. Three and a half years yet right in that moment it felt like yesterday. I was sitting there fresh off of what would've been our ninth anniversary. All because of complications during our daughter's birth. The baby made it into the world, a blessing, our lost daughter returning to us. That's what it felt like since the year before Lauren had miscarried what would've been a baby girl. This time she was here, but Lauren died due to complications during the labor. That's how the doctor put it at first, "complications".

She was supposed to be named Saoirse Reign Carter. In the end I had to name her something else, Michelle Lauren Carter – after the mother who had given everything to her. I wanted her to always carry her mother with her, knowing she'd never know her the way she should have.

The first year had been the hardest. Looking back I'm still shocked I didn't relapse into my old ways of coping. Drugs, getting blackout drunk? All it never seemed so damned tempting. But my kids needed me. Our kids. They only had me. And I would never subject them to all the trauma I'd been raised in. They deserved so much more. So much better. I was determined to give it to them. Instead I threw myself into the group, into my work.

Thanks to this I ended up never home, and hired on a nanny so the kids could be on tour with me. When it wasn't BSB related gigs, I was churning out a solo tour. I wrote a new movie. I made a new album. Anything and everything to keep me working and my mind busy. I didn't want to sit still. The idea of being at the house surrounded by all the memories of the love I'd had and watched get stolen away – it felt like hell. I avoided it at any cost.

During the second year, came therapy. Kevin had talked me into it. In Kevin's Kevin way of forcing you if you want me to be honest. He threatened to sick Kristin on me if I didn't listen and I love her but she's never one I want angry at me. He'd told me that I had them all worried with my workaholic coping. I never took a break. I barely slept. Wonderful Union staff were worried at my VIPs. I was just wrapping up another solo album in between all the tour dates. Music was the best thing to keep me from thinking. I'd already made plans to try and pitch my new script to SyFy. In a way working had become almost as addictive as drugs had been once – which apparently they were all scared would be the next step due to my past.

"I don't want to see you hitting the headlines in the same ways Leslie and Aaron did."

Being reminded of my baby brother's deadly overdose was enough to drive me into therapy.

Another one I couldn't save.

Therapy helped more than I can say. It helped me learn how to deal and see things for what they were once again. I'd gotten trapped in a haze of grief that nothing was as it really was anymore. It didn't make the pain go away. Nothing could do that. Not completely. It taught me how to live with it. It let me get to a point where I could accept that it may fade yet never disappear. In doing this, I was able to take a step back again. I could handle the periods where I wasn't on stage or in a studio without wanting to scream or rage at the unfairness of it all. My kids became the center of everything once again, the way they should be. They were all I had left of Lauren. Living proof of the love we carried between us.