Prologue

“We are so sorry for your loss.”

McKenna heard this way too many times in her life.

Mostly it came from being in the funeral home that her father owned and ran. The one that had been in the Preston family for generations.

This time it was personal.

“Thank you,” she said. 

At fourteen, she accepted the awkward hug from yet one more stranger. Someone that knew her father and mother, she was sure, but no one she could remember.

Or maybe her brain just couldn’t function, as she was trying to not only hold it together for herself but also for her father and younger sister.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that her father ran a funeral parlor for a living, he wouldn’t hand her mother’s wake over to anyone. Rather setting this up himself for his wife and son who both were killed in a car accident just a few days ago.

Michelle Preston had been coming home from picking up her five-year-old son, David, from a playdate when a car chase was occurring. Her mother had no clue. She’d been an innocent bystander like the other six cars crashed into that day.

But her mother’s car was the first one when the guy lost control of what he was driving and hit her head-on. She’d pulled over like you were supposed to do when flashing lights were seen, but it hadn’t mattered.

McKenna had heard more than once that death was instant. She wasn’t sure how that was supposed to make her feel better, but maybe in time it would sink in.

“McKenna!”

She turned her head to where her ten-year-old sister, Molly, was standing in the doorway whaling her name.

Leaving the stranger, she rushed over. “What’s wrong, Molly?”

“My dress has a spot on it,” Molly sobbed. “What am I going to do?”

In Molly’s world this was always an issue. “No one is going to notice,” she said. “It’s fine.”

“They will notice. Mom would fix this. Dad won’t leave to drive me home. Now I look a mess.”

Her sister’s face was red and blotchy from tears. The same kind of tears that McKenna was shedding at night in her room while trying to be strong the rest of the time.

Her mother would want that. Would tell her that it was her place to step up as the oldest and hold the family together. 

She’d been told most of her life she was just like her mother so she had some big shoes to fill and she was going to do it.

She grabbed Molly’s hand. “Come on. Let me see if I can get it out.”

They went to the bathroom and she wet the spot on the bottom of Molly’s dress after she scraped off what she could. It looked like it was just some dried-on food. 

Once she rubbed it clean with soap and rinsed it off she had her sister stand close to the air dryer and kept running it until it was dry.

“It’s gone,” Molly said. “How did you do that?”

“You saw what I did,” she said. “It’s not that hard.”

“I can’t do anything. Mom did it all. What are we going to do? Dad isn’t even talking to us right now.”

Her father was grieving harder than Molly was. But he was doing it silently like McKenna was. Maybe he was just frozen inside from dealing with death his whole life.

But something told her that Dan Preston was going to break soon and she’d have to be the one to hold them together.

“He’s trying to figure things out,” she said. It was the best answer she could come up with. She didn’t know what was going on either and all she wanted to do was get through one day at a time.

And at the end of the day, hundreds of people she didn’t know had come through and talked to her and her family.

Lots of kids. Her friends, Molly’s and David’s friends too. Five- and ten-year-olds shouldn’t have to come here to see this. Neither should teens, but as she’d been told often, death was just as much a part of life as anything else.

It’s just she never thought she’d experience it up close and personal so soon.

“Go home, Dan,” Joe said. He was one of her father’s employees. “We’ll lock up. You need to be there for your family.”

“Yeah,” her father said. “My parents are waiting at the house.”

She knew that. They’d had food and drink here to celebrate her mother and brother’s lives as best as they could after the services. She didn’t want all these people in her home where they might not leave when it was time for her to shed her tears.

But there’d be family there now and that might be worse. She’d heard her grandmother say she’d stay at the house for a few weeks and help, but her father had said no. He had it covered.

McKenna wasn’t so sure of that, but the truth was, she needed the solitude as much as he might.

Molly and she got in her father’s car. The family SUV had been totaled in the wreck. They drove the short distance back to Paradise Place where they lived. It didn’t feel like such a paradise now though.

When she walked in the backdoor, her grandmother came rushing toward her, her mother’s mother. “It’s okay to cry, McKenna.”

“I will,” she said. She knew once she started it wouldn’t end. She didn’t care if others thought she was cold.

She was calling it survival. 

Because now that her world had changed, that was the mode she was in and the one that would make her mother proud.