Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

Felt too the old suspicion that life, as she had thus far experienced it, was a series of detachments. Characters crossed the stage, and some hung around longer than

others, but all ultimately exited.

In her twenties, alcohol, cigarettes, and books, always books, could anchor her

in place.

These last three years had been first a crawl and then a climb toward sanity, toward reclamation of her life and her self, a series of baby steps taken in a tsunami of doubt and terror.

Wait, she thought again. We were supposed to grow old together.

We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.

Fuck giving up. I’ll give up when I die. And it won’t be by my hand.

Because you have no integrity. So vows—the ones you made in a church or the ones you should have made to yourself—mean nothing.

She marveled at her will—the resolve, the balls it took to become someone else so completely that the battle

for dominance between the captive self and the captor self couldn’t become anything but unwinnable. Each would surely subsume the other in a forever war. And, no matter how it ended up, neither could ever return home.

So it had been with Brian Alden, she realized, since the moment he’d donned the purloined coat of Brian Delacroix. And so it had been with Elizabeth Childs and Jeremy James and even Lee Grayson. At...

they’d been other versions and some of those versions had brushed up against Rachel and altered Rachel’s ...