Chapter One

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One

          My boyfriend told me that we would be together forever and then he died.

            The doctor’s told his parents he was fine for the first few months when he started getting the headaches. They said it was just migraines from the air pressure and that it was common, happening to twenty out of one hundred people all over the world. Stupidly, his parents, as well as I and Cade, believed them.

            We found out that it was more than migraines when Cade went blind.

            I shoot up in bed gasping for air and panting as if I just ran a marathon. Quickly, I press the back of my palm to my sweaty forehead and focus on my breathing, trying to calm down. I don’t know where I am.

            Darkness swirls around me except for straight ahead, where night appears threw a window that never existed in my room before. Just as I’m about to calm down I start hyperventilating again, having a full on panic attack because this is not my room.

            This is not my room.

            If I thought I couldn’t breathe before, not it’s worse. I feel as if someone is pressing down on my chest, preventing me from getting any air into my lungs. Quickly, I pry the damp blankets from my bare legs and get out of bed, trying to collect my surroundings. It’s when I flick on the light on the bedside table that a glow is cast across the wooden floor.

            Oh.

            The lighthouse tower lights up and I take a deep breath, instantly feeling relieved. Everything quickly comes back to me.

            One funeral, five newspapers, three tests, six hour car ride and one cottage.

             “It’s been a week,” I murmur absentmindedly to myself.

            I open the drawer in the bedside table and pull out my bulky, black camera. With the strap securely around my neck, I make my way to the glass walls across from my bed and open the sliding door.

            The lighthouse balcony seems much higher up at night when you can’t see the ground.

            Silently closing the glass behind me, I lower myself beside the balcony railing and slide my legs between the bars. For a while I watch them slowly swing back and forth in the darkness, dangling as if they aren’t attached to my body.

            I snap a picture with the shutter open longer than usual even though I’m sure that in the dark, my legs will not show.

            When I’ve clicked the button I let the camera fall into my baggy sweater and lean back on my hands. The night sky spreads out in front of me and I feel like I can see forever. Dark navy colours stretch out all across the side and over the ocean while stars twinkle in the side. For a moment I don’t think that this can be real, that surely I must be in a planetarium in a museum. But as I snap a picture up of the dark sky, I know that I’m not dreaming.

            “You’re up there somewhere,” I mumble wistfully up to the night sky. “I just don’t know where.”

       I let my cheek rest on the back of my palm as I gaze out the window, watching the occasional car go by. For the past week of living here this is all I do each day, usually starting when I wake up in the wee hours of the morning. Once my mother asked what I stare at when I sit here every day. I told her nothing, but really, it was something.

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