An exerpt from David Orsini’s
The Reappearing


I want to tell you the truth. I need to explain when the story involving Tyler Danforth and me heaved up our lives and threw us away, flung us upward at first into long corridors of darkness and swiftly afterward into the nearly endless falling down and down again and again into the depths of a nightmare.
      So I begin.
      Once again, I see Tyler and me in his Ferrari, a GTC4 Lusso. Its gleaming metallic blue blends well with its sleek chassis and its luxury interior. It has a powerful V-12 engine, and it rides like a comet. I know. Tyler has allowed me to drive it on many occasions, because I am his girlfriend, Rachel Hayworth. I never drive the car at its top speed, which is two hundred fourteen miles an hour. But, whenever I take hold of the steering wheel of that Ferrari, I race with relentless fury across a local drag strip, an eight-mile track that is usually deserted at six o’clock on Saturday mornings. 
      On the evening that I want to tell you about, Tyler is driving his Ferrari. It is not the beginning of our time together, his and mine. That beginning occurred six months earlier. But this particular evening, the eighth of October, is a beginning of a different sort. It pushes happiness out of our reach.
      “This has been a tremendous night,” Tyler says as he drives me home after our high school’s autumn dance. “One of my best ever.”
      His words, bonded with heartfelt emotions that surprise him, make his husky voice sound even huskier.
      “It has been tremendous for me, too,” I tell him. “I’ll never forget this night.”
      Light of heart and supremely happy, Tyler flashes a gleaming smile that makes this moment perfect. His dark hair, strong cheekbones, and long, tapering jawline allow him to look older than his sixteen years. He is more grownup than most of our peers, more mature and confident. Self-aware and self-possessed, Tyler is not embarrassed when I admit that I shall never forget this night. Nor is he intimidated by my wily attempts to gain possession of his will or of his soul and of all his plans for the future. Tyler knows how to navigate his freedom. Even in this early phase of his manhood, he easily accepts my remark that I shall never forget this night in which he escorted me to our school’s autumn dance. Tyler is a casual realist. He perceives the world around him with earthbound awareness and with incisive understanding of his friends and his rivals. My telling him that he has accompanied me through an extraordinary evening sounds to his ears like a natural thing. He knows that I have enjoyed this night, even without my saying so. But that I have said so pleases him. 
      “Good to hear,” he answers me. “I like to know when my charm is working.”
      My fear that this night’s happiness will be merely fleeting prods me to say more. I need Tyler’s assurance that his elation is more than a momentary sensation. Uncertain of myself, though, I choose the wrong words because they reveal my distrust of the new happiness that he has brought into my life every day of these six months we have known each other. Through all of my troubled years, before Tyler came to lift me out of my darkness, I was searching for the unexpected visitor or the chance happiness that would rescue me. I was searching for more than a rescuing visitor or the influential blessing that he might bring with him. I was searching for a way to rescue myself.