Once Again by Catherine Wallace Hope
What if you had the chance to save someone you lost? Isolated in the aftermath of tragedy, Erin Fullarton has felt barely alive since the loss of her young daughter, Korrie. She tries to mark the milestones her therapist suggests - like this day: the five hundredth - but moving through grief is like swimming against a dark current. Her estranged husband, Zac, a brilliant astrophysicist, seems to be coping better. Lost in his work, he's perfecting his model of a stunning cosmological phenomenon, one he predicts will occur on this same day - an event so rare, it keeps him from being able to acknowledge this milestone alongside Erin. But when Erin receives a phone call from her daughter's school, the same call she received five hundred days earlier when Korriewas still alive, Erin realises something is happening. Or happening again. Struggling to understand the sudden shifts in time, she pieces together that the phenomenon Zac is tracking may have presented her with the gift of a lifetime: the chance to save her daughter. As Erin is swept through time, she's unable to reach Zac or convince the authorities of what is happening. Forced to find the answer on her own, Erin must battle to keep the past from repeating - or risk losing her daughter for good.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Award-winner Catherine Wallace Hope grew up in Colorado, the setting for her thriller Once Again. She earned her degree in creative writing at the University of Colorado. She also delved into dance in New York and art and psychology in California. When she returned to Colorado, she became an instructor at the renowned Lighthouse Writers Workshop, offering creativity workshops for writers. Currently, she and her family are living on an island in the Pacific Northwest where they serve at the pleasure of two astonishingly spoiled dogs.
Twitter @catwallacehope
Instagram @catwallacehope
Extract
9:20 amSunday, June 20, 2021 | The 500th day | 371 Nysa Vale Road, Boulder, Colorado
Erin Fullarton sat at the island in her kitchen, alone. Wearing the T-shirt and sweatpants from the day before, or maybe the day before that, she shivered slightly, even though the room felt warm. She cradled a cup in her hands, but the remnants of her coffee were cold. Once there was a ghost, she thought. This was the game she and her daughter used to play, telling each other little stories they made up together, five words a turn.
Erin closed her eyes and let herself see Korrie’s face, those round, lucent gray eyes, the way she used to gaze to the side as she searched for words. In the beginning, when Korrie was three and just beginning to figure out the game, she ended every story with her main character—a fairy, a hamster, a fish—successfully going potty, which she found hilarious. She had that little-girl laugh that tumbled across the room as loud as a chord on a harmonica. By the time she was six, shortly before her death, the stories had become more sophis- ticated, with missions to rescue captured sisters and find lost undersea homelands.
Now, Erin took Korrie’s turn and filled in the words for her “. . . who lived in the woods.” Erin put her cup down on the white countertop of the island. “Stop it,” she muttered. “Stop turning it into a story for her.” But she couldn’t make herself stop. It had been nearly a year and a half since Korrie died— five hundred days—and still, all Erin could do was think of her. She couldn’t start new things. She couldn’t make lists. She couldn’t reach out to other people. She couldn’t find her way back to the normal world. Because, she thought, this is what becomes of the mother of a murdered child.
She would never have guessed there would come a time in her marriage when she could no longer talk to Zac about Korrie. But it was true; she just couldn’t. And she couldn’t stand by and witness his struggle. He still tried so hard to be a good father to Korrie, even now. He posted remembrances. He donated picture books to the library in her name. He tended her grave.
It was too painful for Erin to be around him all the time. Despite everything, he seemed to be still alive inside. Stricken, but living. Able to work, able to function in a basic, practical sense. She couldn’t bear to see him day in and day out, wearing his sorrow like a wool sweater, forcing himself to carry on with the meaningless trivialities of day-to-day life, trying to be the husband she needed. She didn’t wel- come his attempts to console her, and she wouldn’t listen to anything he had to say. So he’d agreed to live away from her for a while. For the last few months, he’d been staying at his brother’s house. Dan and his fiancée, Maggie, lived nearby in Nederland, and they, too, were hovering in a holding pat- tern. Because how could anyone continue with their plans now?
But Erin would try her hardest to make a plan for this day. The therapist who ran her Grief Group suggested a time line on which she could mark her progress. “Make it round numbers if you want,” Dr. Tanner had said. “As neutral as simple addition, so there’s no emotional charge. Just days adding up to a milestone.”
Five hundred. My God.
“Imagine them adding up to a turning point in the future,” he’d said. But how? That was the question. How could there be a turning point when all the days that gath- ered on the floor at her feet were so much like the ones before?
