Narrator Amber Reynolds opens the book by introducing herself and revealing three points before Chapter 1 that will inform the rest of the book: “1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie” (1).

It is Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, 2016. Amber Reynolds struggles to figure out where she is. She feels suspended between “sleep and wakefulness” (1). She panics when she determines she cannot move her body, nor can she talk. She can hear but cannot speak, and she begins to understand, through the antiseptic smells and the steady throb of a machine, that she must be in a hospital and, more alarming, she is “voiceless and still” (23). She understands she is in a coma.

The pain is steady rather than intense. She is aware of nurses coming into her room and attending to her, brushing her hair, and turning her over. She gathers from their conversations that she was brought in the night before after she survived a nasty one-car accident. She is relieved at last when she hears her husband, Paul, arrive in the room. However, something in his voice disturbs her, and somehow she is certain that he had something to do with the accident.