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is as well.
    “It’s gonna be all right, man,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder and squeezing hard.
    I hear the raw edges in his voice, and I know that he’s not sure whether there’s any truth at all to what he has just said.
     
    ♪

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
    CeCe
     
    For the next five days, I don’t get out of bed except when Mama runs me a hot bath at night and insists that I get in.
    She waits in my room just outside the bathroom door as if she’s afraid I might do something unexpected. Fall or maybe hurt myself intentionally. She brings me food on a tray at regularly spaced intervals, refusing to let me get away with not eating at least something that’s on the plate.
    But I have no desire to eat. All I want is to sleep.
    Sleep is the only thing that lets me block out all the stuff I don’t want to think about. Can’t bring myself to think about. The dull ache in my left shoulder that never ceases its throbbing. The image of Case at Beck’s graveside, a man broken as I have never before seen one broken.
    But the one looming thing that prevents me from getting out of bed is terror.
    It feels as if my bones have been infused with it. Even the thought of leaving this apartment makes my heart start to race in my chest.
    I feel the adrenaline surge of fear light through me like flame to gasoline.
    There’s this new awareness in me now that I’ve never felt. Before the shooting, I had read about, heard about catastrophic things happening to other people. But that was to other people. Those tragedies didn’t happen in my own life. Or to anyone I loved.
    You always hear people say how life can change in an instant. Go from safe and secure to something not even recognizable as the world you’ve been living in.
    In my dreams, I see Jared’s eyes and the cold blankness of them. He’s become a machine that does not recognize or process human emotion. He’s pointing the gun at me. I watch him pull the trigger with a total lack of ability to stop him. I feel myself falling over and over again, a movie loop on repeat. And every time I hit the ground, I hear the gunfire in another direction, knowing I’m not the only one going down. Holden. Thomas. Beck. Case.
    When I’m awake, I find myself thinking of things I’ve only seen in the news. The Twin Towers and the moment it became clear they were going to fall.
    At the time it happened, Mama hadn’t let me watch footage of it on TV. She said those weren’t images a little girl should have in her head. When I was older in high school, I read a book called Tower Stories . I wanted to learn exactly what had happened that day.
    The book described the regular, normal lives of some of the people who were in the buildings. How they’d gone to work the way they always did and within minutes of getting there, found themselves facing something beyond the worst nightmare anyone could even begin to imagine.
    A plane crashing into a building. Fire and smoke everywhere. Desperate, resigned people jumping from the skyscraper to certain death below. A fate they saw as preferable to burning alive.
    And then there were those who missed the train that morning. Woke up sick. For whatever reason, varied from their typical day of going to work in those buildings.
    They had been spared.
    They must wonder why.
    Like I wonder why I’ve been spared. Why Beck was taken and not me.
    The people who made it out of the building or who didn’t arrive there at all that day. How did they see their lives from that point on? How could they ever look at it the same? How can I?
    I have no idea how to answer this question.
    In order to do so, I will have to look beyond where I am right now. Locked in my apartment, refusing to face anything outside that door.
    I honestly don’t know whether I can do that or not.
     
    ♪
     
    I’VE LOST TRACK of the number of days since I left my bedroom. The afternoon sun is streaming through the slats in my blinds when I hear a knock at the door. The knob