1. The Summer Before Seventeen
CHAPTER 1
THE SUMMER BEFORE SEVENTEEN
NORA
June 2006
15 years old
Breathe.
Just breathe.
My fingers dig into my palms as I remind myself to do the one thing that should come naturally to anyone alive. But right now, my lungs feel like they're filled with cement, each breath a battle I'm losing.
Human?
My reflection in the window stares back, hollow-eyed and foreign.
Sure.
Functioning?
A bitter laugh threatens to escape.
Barely.
Who am I kidding? I'm a disaster. The panic attack I've been suppressing all morning claws at my chest, like a wild animal trying to break free. The room I've been stuck in for the last two and a half hours shrinks with each passing minute, the walls inching closer like a slowly tightening fist.
Condolences float around me like static, blending with the endless clinking of teacups. Each clink sends shards of sound through my skull, splintering what's left of my composure. The sound will haunt my dreams, I'm sure of it – the musical notes of mourning, the symphony of loss.
I need to get out of here.
Time has warped since the funeral this morning. Somehow, two hours feel like two lifetimes, while last week – the last time I heard Dad's laugh – passed in the blink of an eye. The only reason I know what day it is?
It's the day before my sixteenth birthday.
And now, it's also the day I said goodbye to dad forever.
Hugs come at me like waves, each one threatening to pull me under. The scent of perfume, aftershave, and sympathy surrounds me, a suffocating cloud of forced affection. The walls creep closer, the air growing thinner with each "I'm so sorry for your loss."
After two days of pretending I'm okay, I feel like a helium balloon cut loose from its string, floating away into nothingness.
Detached. Untethered. Lost.
Is this how every moment will feel now?
Trapped and numb?
My face aches from wearing this mask of composure, from murmuring polite thanks to people whose names blur together in my grief-addled mind.
It's not fine. Nothing about this is fine.
I'm in purgatory.
The living room of our small Boston home has become a sea of mourners, black-clad figures packed shoulder-to-shoulder like a murder of crows. Dad would've cracked a joke about it – something about penguins at a funeral. I can almost hear his laugh, the way his eyes would crinkle at the corners. The ghost of that sound makes my chest ache.
People get weird at funerals, hovering between awkward sympathy and desperate attempts at comfort. I just wish they'd say less. A simple nod would be better than the endless echoes of empty words reminding me he's gone.
Half the people here, I don't even know.
And I don't care to.
My eyes find Mom across the room, drawn to her like a compass finding north. Despite her puffy eyes and the exhaustion etched in the lines around her mouth, she's poised – a picture of quiet strength. Her black dress wraps around her like armor, elegant yet protective. She's beautiful, even in grief. Her dark hair is pinned back, soft curls falling loose in a way that looks effortless, but I know it took her three tries to get right this morning. I watched her hands shake as she fixed it, over and over, like getting her hair perfect could somehow make this day bearable.
I wish I could be like that.
Instead, I cling to the edges of the room, pressing my back against the cool wall, hoping no one sees me, talks to me, or—God forbid—tries to hug me again. Each embrace feels like sandpaper against my raw nerves.
By Mom's side is Lydia Sullivan, Dad's "other wife" as he used to joke. His voice echoes in my memory: "Some men fear their wives having best friends. Me? I got a two-for-one deal with my family." She's been a permanent fixture in our lives since Mom and Dad met.
Katherine Holt and Lydia Murphy were a packaged deal, inseparable from the start. Dad had known what he was signing up for when he proposed.
Since Dad's passing, Lydia has been an anchor. She's handled everything—the endless phone calls, funeral arrangements, even making sure we eat. It drives Mom crazy, this fierce efficiency born of love, but Lydia doesn't expect gratitude. She loved Dad like a brother, their bond forged through years of shared holidays and inside jokes.
When Mom called to tell her the news, Lydia was on the first flight from New York. She hasn't left Mom's side since, just like when they were teenagers.
For that, I'm grateful.
My gaze shifts to Ollie, my brother, hovering near the kitchen island. Ollie turns eighteen at the end of this year but somehow today he looks like an old soul and a kid at the same time. Most days, I'm the responsible one, while Ollie plays the part of a kid trapped in a growing athlete's body.
But now? Now he wields charm and humor like armor, each joke a shield against the pain I see flickering behind his eyes. He's been like that for as long as I can remember—quick with a laugh, never filtering his thoughts. The words tumble out of him like they can't wait to be heard, but never with cruelty. His humor brings light, even when it's self-deprecating.
It's his way of making everything seem okay, of holding our world together with duct tape and punchlines. But behind that easy smile, he feels everything with an intensity that scares me. He feels it all at once, and even now, on this impossible day, he's trying to make others laugh. I worry about him as much as he worries about me.
Dad was his hero, his compass, and losing him at seventeen is a wound Ollie won't talk about, maybe because he thinks it'll break me to see him break.
But I can handle it.
I can handle anything but this suffocating silence between us.
He's been carrying more weight than any teenager should. His broad shoulders, usually relaxed and confident, now bear the invisible burden of being the "man of the house" —a phrase I heard some well-meaning relative whisper earlier, making me want to scream.
Beside him stands Jake Sullivan. He and Ollie grew up like brothers, thick as thieves, always giving me grief for not being fast or strong enough to keep up with them.
Jake's head snaps up from his hushed conversation with Ollie, and our eyes meet across the room. He smiles, soft and boyish, his sapphire-blue eyes and sun-kissed chestnut hair catching the afternoon light in a way that shouldn't feel possible right now. For a moment, I see the ten-year-old boy who used to chase fireflies with me in the Sullivan's backyard.
But that was before.
Before everything changed.
I want to smile back, to give him some sign that I'm still me, still here. But the ache in my chest has become a permanent resident. It's been there for over a week, like a thorn lodged deep, impossible to ignore. Smiling only seems to make it worse. This morning at the cemetery plays on a loop in my mind, the raw pain tightening its grip around my heart.
"David Wells wasn't just a father or husband; he was a beacon of light," Lydia had said at the funeral, her voice steady but threaded with grief. Her words echo in my mind, cutting through the fog of numbness I've been hiding behind.
It's impossible to accept how quickly life can flip, how one moment you're arguing about curfew, and the next, the person you thought would always be there to argue with is just... gone.
No warning. No goodbye.
Just emptiness where his laughter used to be.
A sharp pang shoots through me, and suddenly, the room feels like it's closing in, the walls pulsing with each heartbeat.
Breathe, Nora.
Just breathe.
My heart races, a runaway train threatening to jump its tracks. It's the same every time the tears threaten to come—this wild panic, this desperate need to escape.
Get out. Now.
Run. Hide.
Jake's face flickers with concern, his eyes following me as I move. There's history in that look, years of shared summers and secret hideouts, of understanding without words. But I can't bear his kindness right now. I can't bear anyone's. I turn toward the hallway, away from the suffocating crowd and their endless condolences.
And those goddamn clinking teacups that won't stop their mournful symphony.
This isn't a nightmare. It's worse than that.
One I can't run from.
No one's entered the spare living room since I found Dad there eight days ago. Yet now, my feet move toward it, pulled by a force I can't fight against.
I take a jagged breath and slide open the glass doors, the smooth metal cool against my palm. The sound of the party—because that's what funeral receptions become, somehow—fades to a distant hum.
This was Dad's sanctuary. His library. His refuge. Shelves of books stretch across the room like embracing arms, interrupted only by carefully curated photographs. It should feel warm, alive with memories—but nothing makes a space emptier than the absence of the person who gave it life. The air is heavy with what's missing, thick with the ghost of his presence.
Dad was an English lecturer, the kind of man who could find poetry in a grocery list. Books weren't just his passion; they were his love language. He passed that love on to me early.
Sundays were our sacred ritual: just Dad and me, lost in stories that spanned from Siddhartha to Nicholas Sparks. He never judged my teenage romance phase, just smiled and said, "Every great story is a love story at its heart, Leni."
Those quiet afternoons, sharing passages and possibilities, are what I'll miss most. Dad was my greatest cheerleader, the only one who ever truly believed I could make it as a writer. That dream feels further away now than ever before.
The hush of the room wraps around me as the door slides shut, muffling the sounds of forced normalcy outside. The photos on the walls catch my eye, each one a snapshot of a life I took for granted. My fingertips graze the frames like I'm reading braille, trying to decode the stories behind each frozen moment.
There's Mom in Paris, caught mid-laugh with a chocolate-smeared croissant in front of the Eiffel Tower on their honeymoon. Her hair was longer then, wild and free like her smile. Ollie beams from another frame, his first football uniform hanging loose on his lanky thirteen-year-old frame. And there—my heart catches—I am at six, gap-toothed and glowing, clutching my first poetry competition certificate. Dad helped me write that poem—a simple ode to the sun and moon, to light and darkness, to the dance of day and night.
"Sometimes the simplest truths are the most profound, Len," he'd said, helping me practice my reading. Now the memory of his voice feels like a punch to the gut.
Then there's the last summer at the Sullivan lake house, one of the rare photos where Dad allowed himself to be captured instead of playing photographer. He was always behind the camera, preserving our moments while staying safely removed from them.
"Remember, my little love," he'd said, his voice carrying across the water as I sat on the dock with him, "life is just an accumulation of micro-moments. If we're not present for them, we'll miss the beauty of a moment we'll never get back."
His words echo now, bittersweet and sharp as broken glass. He was right—when a moment's gone, it's gone forever. Memories don't stay neatly contained; they ebb and flow like tides, dragging you into seas of either joy or sorrow. Loss sharpens their edges, turns even the happiest memories into weapons that cut when you least expect it. The moments we lose hurt because they remind us how precious they were to begin with.
My throat tightens, tears pricking my eyes, but I blink them back.
My gaze drifts to the floor—the exact spot where I found him. My feet are rooted, frozen in place. And just like that, I'm back there again.
Eight days ago.
My voice calling his name as I walked through the door, receiving only silence in return. The casual push of the spare living room door revealing what my mind still struggles to process.
Dad on the floor, unnaturally still. Time suspends as my brain frantically tries to make sense of the scene—this can't be happening—but my body understands immediately. My knees buckle. My lungs forget how to draw breath. My hand reaches for my phone while some distant part of me is already screaming.
I don't remember dialing 911, just fragments of my own voice—broken, desperate—explaining what I've found. The operator's calm instructions seem to come from another universe while I kneel beside him, touching his hand, still warm but wrong.
Behind me, Mom appears in the doorway. Her gasp slices through the room before morphing into a sound I'll never forget—not quite a scream, not quite a sob, but something primal that echoes the exact shattering I feel inside.
Ollie arrives next, summoned by the commotion. He crumples to the floor, whispering prayers to a God he never believed in before this moment.
The paramedics burst in—a blur of uniforms and equipment. Hands on my shoulders pull me back. "Let us try to save him," a voice says, but something in their tone tells me they already know.
My body trembles as I watch them work, going through motions that seem increasingly futile with each passing second. I stand there, holding Mom up as she shakes against me, both of us suspended between hope and the terrible truth my body already knows.
He's gone.
The memory releases me and I'm back in the present, staring at that same spot, now empty but somehow still the center of a universe that collapsed eight days and eight centuries ago.
I shake myself from the memory, trying to claw my way back to the present. The late afternoon sun filters through the library's shutters, painting streaks of gold across Dad's desk. Summer has arrived, its warmth usually a promise of freedom and laughter. But not this year. This year, it feels like a cruel joke.
The counselors Mom forced me to see said grief comes in stages, as if it's a process you can check off like a to-do list for heartbreak. Five neat little boxes to tick: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But they don't tell you how these stages crash into each other like waves, how you can feel all of them at once until you're drowning.
They said I'm strong, resilient, and a survivor.
What they don't understand is that surviving isn't a choice.
It's instinct.
Like breathing when your lungs are on fire or clawing at the surface when you're drowning. It doesn't feel brave. It feels relentless.
Because finding Dad will go down as one of the worst days of my life. But the hardest?
That was twelve days ago.
The day something inside me shattered beyond repair. The day I became a ghost inside my own body.
The irony doesn't escape me—I was already mourning one death when another came to claim what little remained of me. Dad never knew about those darkest hours, about what happened that night.
How could he? I became an expert at smiling through fractured places, at carrying wounds no one could see.
The weight of untold truths clings to me like a second skin—dark and suffocating. Secrets are their own kind of grief—slow, corrosive, isolating. They carve you up piece by piece until you're not sure who's left. They leave you stranded in a loneliness no one else can see.
Now I stand in the doorway of two separate hells. One I can share—the public grief of a daughter who found her father—and one I carry alone, a private devastation no one suspects lies beneath.
But still, you move forward. Because you have to.
Tomorrow will come, indifferent and unyielding. Life will go on, dragging you with it whether you're ready or not.
It won't be the same.
It'll never be the same.
But it will go on.
And somehow, so will I.