Until two years ago, I’d been living the dream. Maybe it wasn’t everyone’s idea of living the life, but it sure had been mine.
It’d started with a random story idea I’d come up with in the shower. An idea I’d spent every night developing into a story from that day on for the next few years until it was finally done.
At the ripe young age of twenty-three, I self-published my first novel. I never really thought anything would come of it or even that it would get noticed among the millions of great books out there.
I’d spent all those years building the world in that book, though. I refused to give up on it, even after having my manuscript rejected hundreds of times over by agents and publishing houses.
Much to my surprise, the young-adult world I’d created turned out to be a hit. It became more popular than I ever would’ve imagined less than three months after I’d hit the publish button.
Suddenly, publishers were falling all over themselves to work with me. It was a dream come true.
I almost signed on with Knightley Publishing House, my ultimate place to have landed, but then my sister convinced me not to. I got my own team, and in the three years that followed, I produced six more bestsellers.
Living the life, for me, had entailed living in a trendy little apartment in downtown Savannah, planning all the trips I’d always wanted to take, and getting to have Sunday dinners with my family every week. Best of all, I got to write about pretty much whatever I wanted, and I never had a manuscript rejected again.
I was reaching for the stars, and just when I’d begun to feel like I might be able to touch them, it all fell apart. All it took for everything to change was one lousy phone call. A phone call that had lasted all of two minutes, but nothing had ever been the same again.
Now I was living a different dream. It wasn’t my own, but that didn’t mean it was bad. It was simply different.
As I stood in the living room of my new home, it was really difficult to believe it’d only been two years. Sometimes, it felt like a decade had passed since that fateful day. Other times, I wondered if my old life had ever really happened at all.
The new house was nice. It was a charming, single-level, three-bedroom house with a red front door and a decent backyard. It wasn’t big by any means, but at least there was space between us and our neighbors—unlike the way it had been at my apartment downtown.
I sighed when I looked around at all the moving boxes still stacked almost to the roof. Sunlight streamed in through the dusty windows, illuminating just how desperately I needed to get on with cleaning and unpacking.
As I had every morning for the last month since we’d moved in here, I went to make some coffee and prepared myself to get through more than one box today. The problem wasn’t that I was too lazy or even too busy to unpack. It was that most of the stuff in most of these boxes didn’t belong to me.
It had belonged to my older sister, Katherine. My parents had kept it in storage for me since that horrible day, and I was grateful to have it. Unearthing all her treasures and trying to use them to decorate a home to live in with her daughter just wasn’t easy.
Whenever I opened any of the boxes, I was assaulted by memories of her. I remembered the very morning that had been the last time I’d seen her. I’d gone to her house to have breakfast with her and her daughter, Katie.
My niece had been five at the time. She was also my goddaughter, and I adored popping in to surprise and spoil her whenever I could. Thanks to a career that had been becoming sort of lucrative, spoiling her was something I had finally been able to afford to do.
Mere hours before that phone call, I had taken her a kite and promised her we’d fly it together that weekend. We never did.
Instead, we’d spent that weekend at my parents’ house planning my sister’s funeral.
It didn’t seem possible in this day and age that something like a ruptured appendix could claim the life of an otherwise healthy young mother. According to the doctors, it wasn’t a common occurrence, but Katherine just hadn’t gotten to the