Chapter One
July 21st, 2011 | 
Author: Sample-Chapter One
When Amanda Roberts left St. Matthews Hospital that evening, she was exhausted. As an emergency room nurse for the past three years, she had grown accustomed to the fast-paced environment where she worked. She had just finished another twelve hour shift and wondered if, at twenty-eight years old, she was getting too old for this kind of work. She knew that it was silly to think like this. But she had been feeling silly lately. She and Jeffrey Hayden were to be married in six weeks and she could not help herself. She knew she was lucky. She was to be married to someone that she had known all her life and that she had been in love with since high school.
Indeed, Amanda and Jeffrey had met when Amanda was barely was six years old after she changed schools, when her adoptive parents moved to an upscale beachfront neighborhood in Long Island. Jeffrey, who was the same age as Amanda and who was a student at Amanda’s new school, always said that he fell in love with her the first day he saw her in the classroom.
For her part, Amanda only remembered meeting Jeffrey for the first time when Jeffrey’s parents threw a kid’s birthday party for Jeffrey and invited all of the kids in Jeffrey’s class. Except for eating cake with Jeffrey and the other children, Amanda barely remembered what happened at the party. Soon after the party however, Amanda’s and Jeffrey’s parents became very close friends and would often invite one another out to dinners and parties. As a result, Jeffrey and Amanda, being the only children of their parents, wound up spending a lot of time together, often sharing even the same babysitter. Consequently, Amanda and Jeffrey grew to become best friends. It wasn’t until she was a junior in high school that Jeffrey confessed his love for Amanda.
As Amanda’s mind wandered through the events of the day when she had also admitted her love to Jeffrey, a tune from a Billy Joel song was coming through her headphones that plugged into the smart phone that she was holding. As she sat in the crowded subway train that would take her to her condominium in downtown Manhattan, she began humming with Billy Joel, “I love You Just the Way You Are”. Although Amanda noticed that the people seated next to her on the train seemed to disapprove of her singing, Amanda didn’t care. She was allowed to sing badly for once. She was a woman in love.
When her mother’s call came, interrupting the tune, Amanda jerked as if she was being brought back suddenly to the present from a fantasy-filled dream. As she unplugged the headphones from the smart phone to answer the call, she didn’t realize that it would be a call that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
