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in her head, as she always did, thinking of all the ways it could have been different, and why it should have been, and what she should have done and didn’t. But it always turned out the same way. She was alone, and Mark and Chris were dead.
    She and her husband had gone to a holiday party given by friends two days before Christmas. There were going to be children and a Santa Claus, so they had taken Christopher with them. Ginny had never seen the photographs of that night, but the pictures of him on Santa’s lap had been heartbreaking for Becky to look at when she packed them for her sister, along with all Chris’s baby albums and her wedding photographs with Mark. They were in the boxes Ginny had never opened that were stacked in the unused second bedroom of her New York apartment. She had no idea what Becky had sent her as souvenirs of her lost life, and had never been able to face them.
    Ginny and Mark had been the golden couple, network stars. She was an on-air reporter, and he was the most popular anchorman in the business. Handsome, beautiful, and madly in love, they had married when Ginny was twenty-nine, with a blossoming network career, and Mark was already a star. Chris had been born the following year. They had a gorgeous home in Beverly Hills and everything they had ever wanted, and a marriage and life that were the envy of their friends and all who knew them.
    They went to the party that night, with Chris in the back seat in a little red-velvet Christmas suit with a plaid bow tie. He was three, and couldn’t wait to get on Santa’s lap. While Ginny watched him, Mark had headed for the bar and had a glass of wine with some of the men. He’d had a long day, and Ginny had a glass of wine, too. Most of the parents had a glass in their hand and were in a festive holiday mood. None of them were drunk, and Mark seemed fine to Ginny when they left the party to get Chris home to bed. She had said it a thousand times afterward, that Mark appeared sober to her, as though that would make a difference and would change everything, but it never did. The autopsy showed that his blood alcohol level was over the limit, not shockingly so, but just enough to affect his reflexes and slow his reactions. He’d obviously had more than one glass, while she had been watching Chris and talking to the other mothers. And knowing how responsible Mark was, Ginny was sure Mark hadn’t felt as though he drank too much that night, or he would have asked her to drive or call a cab.
    They took the freeway to get home, flipped over the divider when it started to rain, and had a head-on collision with a sixteen-wheeler, which crushed their car. Mark and Chris were killed instantly. Ginny had been in the hospital for a month with a broken vertebra in her neck and two broken arms. They had to use a Jaws of Life to pry her out of the car. Becky had gone to the hospital as soon as they called her, but they hadn’t told Ginny what had happened to Mark and Chris. Becky told her the next day. Three lives had ended in an instant, Ginny’s as well as theirs. She never went back to the house afterward, and had Becky get rid of everything, except the few things she packed up to save for her and later sent to New York.
    Ginny had stayed with Becky while her neck healed, and she had been incredibly lucky. The break was high enough that it didn’t paralyze her, although she wore a neck brace for six months. She resigned from her job at the network, avoided all their friends, and couldn’t face anyone. She was convinced that her letting Mark drive home that night was what had killed them, and that it was her fault that he drove. She had assumed they’d each had a single glass of wine, since Mark rarely drank more than that, and she didn’t like driving on the freeway at night. It had never occurred to her to ask him how many glasses he’d had, since he looked sober to her. If she’d asked him, she told herself later, she could have driven, and