“There’s a large moving truck flipped over on the side of the road. Its windows are smashed, glass surrounding it. I look closely at the truck, trying to figure out what happened. That’s when I see that it isn’t all glass. The road is covered in little specks of something else. I walk closer and I see one at my feet. It’s a Fruity Pebble. I scan the area for the one thing I pray not to see and I see it. Right in front of me—how could I have missed it?—halfway underneath the moving truck, is Ben’s bike. It’s bent and torn. The world goes silent. The sirens stop. The city comes to a halt. My heart starts beating so quickly it hurts in my chest.”

Ben Ross’s death is the inciting incident of the novel. Elsie Porter’s life changes forever when she rushes out into the street outside her house and discovers that her new husband has been killed in an accident while running an errand she asked him to make. Elsie is, in turn, immobilized by shock and grief, guilt and confusion--emotions that catalyze her heartbreak and healing journey over the course of the novel. The present tense—used here and throughout the novel—gives this early, suspenseful scene a sense of immediacy.

“Ana leaves, and as I hear the door shut, it hits me how alone I am. I am alone in this room, I am alone in this apartment, but more to the point, I am alone in this life. I can’t even wrap my brain around it. I just get up and pick up the phone. I get the number from the front of the refrigerator and I see a magnet for Georgie’s Pizza. I fall to the floor, my cheek against the cold tile. I can’t seem to make myself get up.”

Ben’s death augments Elsie’s loneliness, represented through the repetition of “alone” here, and inspires her search for new relationships and connections. In the immediate wake of losing Ben, Elsie pulls away from her friends and community because she’s convinced no one understands her grief. Furthermore, every object in her surroundings reminds her of her late husband and thus threatens to lodge her in her sorrow for the foreseeable future. This passage also introduces the narrative’s formal rules, as Elsie’s response to the Georgie’s Pizza magnet instigates a shift into the past: a temporal pattern that repeats throughout the novel.