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Prologue
Billie Rose
My town was in ashes.
Monroe’s Bar, with its wide green columns and huge plate glass windows and old wooden bar sticky from years of use, had been reduced to a skeleton. All that remained was the foundation, the footprint of a place that I’d grown up walking by.
Skipping along the sidewalk that ran in front of it.
Skipping along the sidewalk that ran the full length of Main Street.
Skipping along all the places that were familiar and safe andmine.This was my happiness, my childhood, mylife.
Then I’d grown up.
And I’d made memoriesinsideof Monroe’s.
Laughter filling my ears as I leaned against that sticky wooden bar top.
My first taste of beer—and thinking it was disgusting but drinking it anyway because my dad had wanted to share it with me on my twenty-first. And yeah, I lived in a small town and there wasn’t much to do except play hockey and watch hockey and drink and get high and make out on the Ridge—but my dad had talked about sharing a beer with me at Monroe’s from the time I’d become familiar with what a beer was.
I hadn’t wanted to take that away from him.
Not when I wasn’t what he wanted.
Not when I could never be what he wanted.
Billy.
My older brother.
Who’d died before he was two years old. So young and yet still a tiny human I felt like I knew because the memories he’d left behind were vast.
How he’d giggled when my dad blew raspberries on his belly. How he hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time for the first six months and then one night he’d gone to bed and slept for a full ten, freaking out my parents when they, too, had woken after finally getting a full night’s sleep after all those months. How Billy had always kicked off one sock—just one—and how it was always the right sock.
How, just after he’d turned one, he’d had a seizure—intense, long, and frightening.
And then how he’d had more.
Somany more.
That the doctors hadn’t been able to find the cure for or the cause of, and then, one day…
He hadn’t woken up.
I’d been in utero then, my mom nearly seven months along. Initially, I’d been a joyous surprise. A sibling for Billy. A surprise addition to the large family they’d always wanted.
Then I’d become a burden—a parasite that made her sick and tired when she needed to care for Billy or go to his appointments. Something that had taken attention and focus away from her son, who she’d known wouldn’t be on Earth much longer.
Something that had then become been a painful reminder of all she’d lost.
Then I’d been born…
My parents loved me—I had no doubt about that.
But they were also sad I was there, and Billy wasn’t. I had no doubt about that either.
So…I’d saved the beer for Monroe’s and my dad, giving him the memory he craved, even if it wasn’t with the child he’d wanted it to be, with thesonhe’d wanted it to be with.
