I Let You Go

Jenna has a nightmare, waking herself up. The bad dreams won’t stop, and she keeps thinking of alternative endings where Jacob survives. She says, “for weeks now I have woken several times a night to the thud of a small body on the bumper, and to my own fruitless scream as he rolls off and slams onto the wet road” (60).

Jenna has become a hermit with a bad hand that prevents her from working. She feels the pain is deserved and likes the solitude. She gets up to jog on the beach, running to the sea where the tide comes in. She goes through the water, speeding up until she almost hits the cliff ahead of her. She only stops herself at the last minute with her hands outstretched. She feels an urge to write her name in the sand.

She decides to take a picture of her name in the sand, “so I can capture the moment I felt brave” (63). The framing is wrong, so she writes other names in different places, and then takes pictures. The incoming tide is already washing them away. Suddenly she feels homesick, considers visiting Bethan, then changes her mind. Her door isn’t locked, as the mechanism is unreliable.