To my horror, my friends start pulling me off her. “No!” I scream, resisting them, but I’m weak because I’ve already lost a lot of blood.

When they see the front of me drenched in blood and with numerous shards of mirrored glass planted in me, they gasp and I hear Peter yell, “Call 911!”

Penelope is standing near us, crying, her hand over her mouth. She’s dialing 911 on her cell phone.

I feel faint. My legs give way under me. Jack and Peter gently lay me down on the floor, still restraining me, for I haven’t stopped struggling to get back to Lily. They position me away from her. “Let me go!” I turn my head in every direction, looking for her, but I can’t see her.

“It’s too late,” Georgia says, sweeping the hair out of my face, trying to calm me. “It’s over.”

No. I yank my arm away from them and lift myself up on one elbow, but I get dizzy. Just before losing consciousness, I see, a few feet away, what is left of Lily: a pile of tiny, sparkling pieces.

Chapter Eighteen

When I regain consciousness at the hospital a few hours later—at around six o’clock in the morning—the first two things I’m aware of are a red tube going into my arm and the pain of my wounds. A moment later, far greater pain invades me as the memory of Lily’s death comes rushing back.

My failure to keep her together replays in my mind in horrific detail.

I gaze at my arms lying over the covers. Both wrists are bandaged, as well as my left upper arm, and I can see many Band-Aids on the rest of my skin.

I hardly care when the doctor tells me I was lucky the paramedics reached me quickly and began fluid resuscitation as soon as I was in the ambulance. I’m told that if they hadn’t, I might not be alive because I’d gone into hemorrhagic shock due to the massive loss of blood. My blood pressure was dangerously low and my heart rate insanely high.

I hardly care when the doctor tells me I arrived at the hospital with over a hundred shards of mirrored glass lodged in me. And I hardly care when he tells me it took him and his team three hours to remove all the pieces.

But suddenly, I have a question I care deeply about: “Where are the pieces?” I ask, getting agitated.

“It’s important that you stay relaxed,” he tells me. “You’re in the last hour of a four-hour blood transfusion. You suffered a class III hemorrhage and lost 40 percent of your blood, most of it lost through four deep incisions—one on your neck and three on your wrists and arm.”

“You’re not answering my question. Where are the hundred pieces you removed from my body?”

“Don’t worry. We saved them all, per your friends’ instructions. We’ve already given them to Peter Marrick. It must have been a valuable sculpture, eh?”

I sigh with relief, though I have no idea what he’s talking about regarding a sculpture.

He comes closer and says, “You were very lucky. You have eighty-five stitches on your body, but you didn’t get a single cut on your face.” He puts his fingers under my chin and raises my face toward his. “Your face is flawless. It would have been a shame to get it scarred.”

I pull away, put off by his bedside manner.

Quickly, he adds, “That’s not to say your body is any less perfect. But scars on the body don’t matter. They’re cool, like tattoos. I’m just saying it’s a miracle your face came out unscathed.”

There’s nothing miraculous about it. I don’t have cuts on my face because I wasn’t saying goodbye, I was trying to save her. If I’d been saying goodbye to Lily before she died, I would have pressed my cheek against hers, I would have rested my mouth and chin on her shoulder, I would have buried my face in her neck. Instead, I was trying to see how best to hold her, trying to look where best to apply pressure to keep her together. If getting my face disfigured could have saved her, I would not have hesitated.

Tears start running down my cheeks. The doctor wipes one away and says soberly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cause offense.”

I burst out laughing and instantly resume crying. A sense of loneliness invades me.

He keeps trying to fix what he thinks made me cry. “Don’t worry, you’ll hardly have any scars on your body. Most of the cuts were superficial and didn’t require stitches.” Finally, he wisely decides to change the topic. “Are there any family members you’d like us to contact?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. I don’t want my mom’s dream vacation in Australia to be ruined by news of my condition. She’d be so distraught, she’d either cut her trip short or at the very least she wouldn’t be able to enjoy the rest of it, and I can’t bear either option.

“But . . . are any of my friends here?” I ask.

To my relief they are. The doctor lets them in. Georgia rushes to me, looking extremely anxious. Jack and Peter follow. They all look traumatized. Peter holds my hand.

As for Penelope, she’s not here. When the doctor leaves and my friends and I are alone, they tell me Penelope is home, trying to piece Lily back together, like she would one of her ugly broken pots. They say she stopped by the hospital earlier and got all the remaining pieces from Peter.

Georgia adds, in an urgent, secretive tone, “Everyone was asking how you got a hundred shards of mirror stuck in you. I had to make up a story. We said you had a large mirror sculpture that you accidentally knocked over and fell on top of as it shattered.”

I nod, filled with gloom as I’m visualizing what really happened. After a moment, I ask, “What happened to Lily? What was that?”

Georgia looks at Jack and Peter. Then she replies, “Death by sorrow, we assume. I think the sad music she played each time she felt depressed created a vicious circle she couldn’t get out of. Her mood made the music sadder, which in turn made her mood sadder. It’s as if her mood and her music became entwined in a dance of despair, reinforcing each other, creating a downward spiral that pulled Lily under.”

My throat is clenched so tight I can hardly breathe.

Peter is at my other side. He’s caressing my cheek, smiling at me lovingly, wanting me to turn away from Georgia.

The doctors were hoping to let me go home later, but it turns out not to be possible because the transfusion doesn’t agree with me. I develop a fever, which I’m told is a febrile non-hemolytic transfusion reaction. They say it’s common and won’t cause any lasting problems.

The fever goes away by the end of the day, and I’m allowed to leave at four the following afternoon.

PETER, GEORGIA, AND Jack are here to escort me out. We move down the hospital corridor like a funeral procession, our heads bowed, thinking of Lily.

Our plan is to go directly to Penelope’s apartment because I want to see Lily’s remains.

Before we’ve even left my hospital floor, I’m being stared at by doctors, nurses, and visitors. They stare at me as we wait for the elevator, then in the elevator, then in the lobby. Not being disguised is even worse than I remembered. And they don’t just stare. Some of them whisper to each other while staring. I can’t wait to get out of here.

Georgia decides we should sit in the coffee shop in the lobby for tea and a snack, which annoys me because she knows I want to see Lily’s pieces right away, and I’m the one who’s injured. But Jack’s on her side and Peter’s neutral, so we go in and get a table.

I refuse all food and drink. While my friends are getting their snacks at the self-service counter, people keep staring at me. It’s excruciating. I’m getting agitated, and the stress is causing me to feel my cuts more acutely, as though these strangers’ eyes are cutting into me. I won’t be able to take this on a daily basis, especially now that Lily is dead from all this crap.