LITMIR.BIZ

      Prologue

      I remember her so clearly.

      There’s an image in my mind of her standing on the observation deck at the top of the Empire State Building in New York. She was about twenty-one and it was a cold day, but she didn’t care that the wind made her long red hair fly and her eyes glisten as she threw her arms out wide. The sheer joy she was feeling radiated from every pore, her smile wide and irrepressible. Like it would never fade.

      Another memory. Maybe a year later. Sitting on the end of a cold Scottish pier in the early hours of the morning with a man she was madly in love with. She said he was the third love of her life. Or was it the fourth? It was a standing joke with her friends that her romantic history was like a constant repetition of death defying leaps. She’d fall from a great height into the abyss, but, as if on a bungee cord, she’d snap right back out again at warp speed a day, a week, a month later, leaving a few cases of whiplash along the way.

      Another flashback, to the following summer. On a beach in Malibu, watching the surfers at dawn, making lines in the sand with her toes. I knew the whole holiday had been put on a brand new credit card and the expense sent it straight to its limit, but she gave that no thought at all. All that mattered was that moment. That experience. Life is for living. Her mantra. A cliché, but, yep, life is for living, she’d say.

      Along the way, she’d met him. The one who made her forget everyone else. Dizzy with love and optimism, she said yes to the happy-ever-after dream, and prepared to waltz up the aisle with him. But they didn’t make it. Life took her on another path and into the arms of someone else.

      It was just a detour. A blip.

      Still, she would dance, she would throw back shots and bounce the glass on the bar, she would start a party in an empty room and watch as people flocked to join the fun.

      She would talk about how there were no limits to how great her life could be, and you couldn’t listen to the enthusiasm and certainty in her voice and not believe her.

      At twenty-three, she thought nothing could stop her, that she was indestructible, that there was absolutely nothing she couldn’t do or achieve if she wanted to.

      Perhaps it was the naivety of youth, but she didn’t even see the perfect storm coming.

      Marriage. Children. Ailing parents. A mind-blowing betrayal. A chain of events that would hijack her world, changing her until the person she was no longer existed.

      Yep, life is for living, she would say.

      Until she became nothing more than a battle-weary survivor, who set aside her own life just to get through the days.

      I remember that young, carefree woman so clearly.

      Because she was me.