A Thousand Broken Pieces (A Thousand Boy Kisses #2)

by Tillie Cole

It had been almost four years. Four long, excruciating years without her, and I still couldn’t think of her name or picture her pretty face without feeling my heart collapse on me like a mountain caving in. Without feeling the shadow of death’s unyielding fingers wrap around my lungs and starve them of air.

I was utterly exhausted.

Thinking gave me space to break.

I was simply broken. I didn’t know how to heal, how to put myself back together again.

truth was, when Poppy died, all light vanished from my world, and I’d been stumbling around in the dark ever since.

I had always been studious. I had always been the smart one. The bookworm. The one who talked of physics and equations and molecular structures.

Ida was the loud one, the dramatic sister, the funny one, capturing all the attention—in all the best ways. And Poppy…Poppy had been the dreamer. She had been the believer, the creative one, the one with music and never-ending happiness and hope in her heart.

The notebook she had left to me. The one I had never read or even opened.

grief never left us. Instead we adapted,

A loved one’s death wasn’t a onetime thing that you had to endure. It was an endless cycle. A cruel Groundhog Day that burned away at your heart and soul until there was nothing left but scorched flesh

where they once had been.