Almost. Life didn’t hand out easy equations with perfect answers. Instead, there were things like one minute your mom was there, and the next she was gone. One minute your sister was awful, and the next she was nice. But how long before Miranda turned mean again? The second Ariel figured her dad was asleep, she snuck back upstairs and retrieved the DVDs. Back inside her room, she curled up in her closet and popped one of the discs into her laptop, fast-forwarding to all the scenes with her mom. There were days when she could hardly remember what her mom looked like—at least, how Mom looked before the accident. What she mostly remembered was the way Mom looked in the car. Ariel’s stomach hurt at the memory, which never did anyone any good. What’s more, a real shrink should have gotten that. Shouldn’t he know that talking about the accident was massively screwed up and totally a waste of time? Of course, in all her trying to convince her dad that the guy was a quack, she couldn’t talk about the accident because she had zero interest in letting him or anyone else know that she had to watch her mom die in the car.
