Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask . . . with nothing beneath it?

If everyone else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or—in this case—feared might come to pass passed by instead.