Cris now sat on the bed, in the room where he had grown up. This place had been his first safe haven. He tried once more to find himself, sitting in the room where all of his values had once been formed, but his recollections were now skewed in the shifting dimension of Kennidi's death.

He had enjoyed victory after victory here: Scholastic All-American, UCLA quarterback, Rose Bowl MVP. He had dragged all the trophies back to this place and examined each honor carefully, searching for hidden meaning. He had been on such a frantic quest for achievement; he had never spent much time looking inward. Now he was afraid to look. Afraid of what was missing.

Even in high school, he'd begun to thrive on the adulation of others. He had tried to sort the meaning, looking for what his father called "the true elevating factors." Now the photographs and trophies from his "Golden Boy" youth mocked him from the shelves of his room and made him feel even more lost and alone than before.

Self-pity was not an emotion that suited Cris, and yet after Kennidi's death it engulfed him, filled his stomach with bile and his mind with confusion.

His father knocked on the door and entered, uninvited. Richard Cunningham had been Cris's inspiration growing up; a college Ail-American end at Michigan and a self-made millionaire. Cris had desperately wanted to please him and follow in his footsteps, until Kennidi got sick. After that, everything changed.

"Cris, you should come down. It's rude not to at least say hello," his father said. "Laura's down there handling it all by herself. You should go be with her."

"I killed her, Dad," Cris said softly. "I killed Kennidi. Nothing's going to change that. I can't face it. I can't."

"You didn't kill her. That's crazy," Richard said, his voice betraying the sharp new edge of impatience with his son. "If anything killed her it was the pyridostigmine bromide, or the insect repellent, the P. B.-Deet. It wasn't you; the lawsuit will eventually prove it. The new doctors say that…" He stopped because he could see he had lost his son's attention.