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Chapter 5


2003 – Two years after the accident

At the ringing of the bell, Max clapped his hands together.

"Okay, guys. That's it for today."

He was met with cheers and the loud sound of chairs being pushed away from their desks.

"I'll see you all on Monday. Have a nice weekend."

"You too, Mr. Evans," the children answered in unison before they slipped out of the classroom to embrace the waiting weekend. It didn't take long for the classroom to become empty of the laughing and talking voices of twenty little seven-year-olds.

"Mr. Evans?"

Max looked up in surprise from the notes he had sat down to go through and found the shy little Hannah standing in front of the desk, shyly looking up at him through her dark bangs.

"Yes, Hannah?" he asked softly.

"I picked this for you during recess," Hannah answered and handed him a flower.

"Th-thank you," Max stuttered as the flower was placed in his outstretched hand. With a tentative smile, the little girl quickly skittered out of the classroom and the silence enveloped him.

Daisy.

It was a daisy.

She had loved daisies.

"It's that for me?"

He looked up, not surprised to hear her voice. She was sitting on one of the desks at the back of the classroom. She wore the same dress as she had worn every time she had visited him. It was a long white thin dress that softly hugged her form and billowed out around her shapely legs. Those legs were now dangling over the edge of the desk. The soft curls of her honey colored hair were framing her face.

"A little girl gave it to me."

"Hannah, right?" She smiled.

Sometimes he wondered if she was just a figure of his imagination or if she was really there.

"Yes."

"They are beautiful. You know how much I love daisies, right?"

"I remember."

Mesmerized, he watched her hop down from the desk and slowly make his way up to her desk. She was glowing.

"You look like an angel," he whispered.

She smiled.

The daisy had fallen out of his hand and her delicate smooth hand was now reaching for it. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to feel her skin under his fingers.

"Max?"

His head jerked up in the direction of the sound.

Madison.

His head quickly turned back towards her, but she was gone. Vanished.

"Max? Are you okay?"

He could feel the tears burning behind his closed eyelids. Taking a deep breath he nodded.

"Yes, I'm fine. Thank you, Madison."

There was a pause and then he heard her move into the classroom. "If you ever need to talk, I'm here."

Max swallowed. "Thank you. I appreciate it."

Sometimes he wished they would all go away. All the people with their caring eyes and pitiful looks. Sometimes he wished that he could just close himself up in a room and not have to deal with reality. That he could live in his own world with her and his son.

"Um...I'm gonna go now."

There was a pause. She was probably waiting for him to answer, but he didn't have any words to give her.

"You have my number, right?"

Max nodded.

"Right," Madison said. "I'll see you on Monday then."

Max nodded again.

"Bye Max."

She was standing in the doorway, soundlessly watching him for a couple of seconds before walking away. He could feel her eyes on him. And he hated it. He knew what they thought about him. At first, right after the accident, everyone had given him time to grieve and had given him space. His loss had been accepted and respected.

But it had been two years.

Now his grieving wasn't considered healthy anymore. So, he had started to hide it to bury it deep down inside of him, where not even he dared to access it. He had started going to work. He had started living again, but then she had started to appear and his whole foundation had shook. He could clearly remember the first time he had seen her. It was on the day exactly one year after her death. He had finally decided to start cleaning out her clothes and he had seen her in the wall mirror. When he turned around she had been gone. He didn't know why she was visiting him. Was he going crazy? Was he seeing ghosts? Or was she just a figure his lonesome grieving existence was conjuring up? He had never removed her clothes from the closet. They were still there. Hanging next to his.

She had been everything to him. He didn't know how he was supposed to go on without her. She had been his other half and they had just started their life together. They had just become parents and had started their own little family. And that drunk driver had taken it all away just by getting into the car with alcohol in his body. A single decision on that man's part had changed Max's life irreversibly.

Max had spent months trying to find scapegoats. At first it had been the drunk driver. Then it had been the doctor for not being able to save her during the operation, but most of the blame he had put on himself. Maybe he could've prevented it if he had gone with her that night, if he hadn't decided to stay with Isabel and his parents. If he had convinced Tess that Josh could sleep in his old room and they could all stay a little longer. If he had just not given Tess Josh's jacket, somehow pausing her in her departure. If she had left a little sooner, maybe she wouldn't have been on the road at the same time as the driver. Maybe she would still be here with him today. Alive.

His son would have been four years old in two weeks. His son had never been given a chance to explore life. It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair. And time couldn't do anything to heal all the wounds inside of him. He was torn, destroyed inside. He felt hollow. He had died that day with her. Ever since then he had been a walking shell. Nothing inside. And the emptiness hurt. It hurt so much that sometimes he just wanted to lie down and go to sleep and hope that he never wake up again.

And yet, here he was, two years after the accident. He was filling his days with the laughter and entertaining questions of seven-year-olds. In the evenings, he corrected homework and planned for the next lesson. He kept himself busy. Anything to make himself believe that he could do this. That he could live again.

The dreams had disturbed him in the beginning, but then he had discovered the wonder of sleeping pills. They were like a switch to his brain. With them he could switch off his thinking and go to sleep and wake up the next day and go on pretending that nothing was wrong.

His eyes drifted to the daisy and then back to the door, which Madison had left slightly ajar. He really liked Madison. She had become one of his friends when he had gotten the work as a teacher at the elementary school, but it was the time after Tess's death that she had become a really close friend. She had been there to comfort him a lot of times when he had been prepared to let the sorrow drag him down, and she had pulled him back up again. The majority of his old friends he had shared with Tess and after the accident their sorrow was drowning him. Madison was like a new start, someone that didn't know Tess, but whom he could introduce to her through his memories. She had been there when he had wanted to cry, comforting him.

But no one really knew the depth of his sorrow. How he was barely able to get up every morning. How the simple act of putting on clothes in the morning had turned into a decision between wanting to move on or not.

Some people went through their whole lives looking for that special someone who loved you unconditionally. Who shared everything with you. Who gave you everything, intellectually, mentally, and physically. That special someone. Your soulmate. But what if you already found that special someone? What if you found that person in someone everyone at first just had believed was a high school crush? What if this person made all your dreams come true? What if this person agreed to spend the rest of their life with you? What if this person was ripped away from you... What was there left to live for? Should you go on searching and hope that, against all odds, there was another soulmate out there for you? Should you settle for another person, one who didn't make all your dreams come true but was a good second best?

Max could torture himself for hours about whether life was worth living without Tess. She had been his everything and when your everything is stolen from you. What do you have left?

Nothing.



TBC...

Thank you for reading!