Flash Forward: July 2063

“Wake up!”

Jane felt her daughter Avril shaking her by the arm. She forced her eyes open and sat up on the bed.

“Mom,” Avril said, “Adele’s going to take the kids back to her house now. Do you want me to stay with you?”

“Oh no, sweetie,” Jane responded. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

“Are you sure?” Avril was searching her face with a look of concern, and Jane made the effort to paste on a reassuring smile.

“I’m fine,” she said with a nod. “Right now I’d really just like to be alone.”

Alone, Jane thought, once all the well-wishers had left and she found herself enveloped in the silence of an empty house. She’d been craving a moment of solitude all afternoon. Now that she had it, she found her thoughts returning to the same memory she’d been replaying in her mind over and over since it happened – the night Adam went to sleep and never woke up.

He’d been quiet all evening, she remembered. They’d been out riding around in the car that afternoon, listening to the oldies station, and an Amy Winehouse song had come on. Back To Black. Jane had reached for the radio controls to turn it off, but Adam had swatted her hand away. “I want to hear it,” was all he’d said.

He left no time to regret.
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet.

Me and my head high,
And my tears dry,
Get on without my guy.

You went back to what you knew,
So far removed from all that we went through,

And I tread a troubled track.
My odds are stacked.
I'll go back to black.

That evening she found Adam sitting up in bed when she came in. He had a picture frame in his hand. It was the photo he kept by the side of his bed – the four of them on some family vacation, back when the girls were still teenagers. Jane crawled under the covers next to him, and he reached out and took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. She looked over his shoulder at the photo, following the direction of his gaze. He was looking at Avril. Your eye couldn’t help but go to her – the way that glorious burst of flaming red always seemed to cast the rest of her dark-haired family into shadow.

“Back to black,” Adam murmured. He looked at Jane and shook his head. “How could she do it? How could she dye that hair?”

Jane sighed. It wasn’t Avril they were talking about. “I guess she wanted to be someone else for a little while.”

He nodded. “Someone else,” he replied. “Did I ever tell you the last thing she said to me? Before she left Idaho? She said ‘I can be Amy if that’s what you need me to be.’”

“Adam—“

“I did it,” he continued. “I made her someone else.”

Jane took the photo out of his hands and placed it back on his bedside. “You’re tired,” she whispered. “You get morbid when you’re tired.”

“How could you still love me after that?”

“Oh Adam,” she sighed. “I’ve loved you for so long. I can’t even remember what my life was like before I loved you.”

A ghost of a smile crossed is face. “And I cannot remember what life was like from photographs, or trying to recreate images life gives us from the past.” He was humming softly, and it took her a moment to recognize the tune. An old favorite of hers. The Sun. It had been a long time since she’d heard him sing that one. 

“Sometimes it’s a sad song,” she whispered.

His smile was fading as he continued the next line. “And I cannot forget, refuse to regret, so glad I—“ He broke off, interrupting himself as he turned to ask her a question.

“Do you remember our honeymoon?”

She smiled. It felt like a lifetime ago.

“Do you remember how the sun looked when it was setting?” he asked. “Like a big red ball of fire that took up the whole sky?”

She turned on her side and looked at him, but he was staring up at the ceiling through unseeing eyes.

“I remember,” she said.

“Do you remember what you asked me?”

“What?”

“Truth or dare,” he said. “Biggest regret.” He paused for a moment, his eyes never wavering from the ceiling. “I never told you the answer.”

“Adam,” she whispered. “I know the answer. I know.”

He looked at her face then, turning his head toward her with a sudden jerk. “Yeah, you know. You’re the only one that really knows.”

She smiled at him sadly.

“I could have saved her. She was standing right in front of me, gulping it down by the mouthful, and I didn’t see it. I never saw it coming.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“I thought you were the fragile one,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was her.”

“You have to let it go,” Jane replied. “You have to forgive yourself.”

He shook his head, repeating the same question he had asked her a few moments ago.  “How could you still love me after that?”

“How could I not?” she responded. “I’ve loved you for 65 years, and I will love you for the rest of my life.”

He smiled at her, hearing echoes of words he had said to her, a long time ago. A truth he had spoken once to her. When was that? When he proposed? The truth, he knew, but not the answer to the question he needed answered. “Do you forgive me, Jane?”

“I forgave you a very long time ago.”

“That was the strangest part,” he said. “The way the sun got bigger and bigger and brighter and redder. And then that moment when the fire filled up the whole entire sky – that was always the last moment, just before it dropped below the edge of the cliff, and then it was night.”

His mind was wandering. “You’re tired,” she whispered, giving his hand a squeeze. “Go to sleep now.”

“I can’t. I’ve got music stuck in my head.”

Jane let out a sigh as Adam put his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. She kissed him on the temple, and stroked his back, soothing him like a little boy.  “It was a hell of a song,” she heard him mutter. “A hell of an album.”

She wasn’t sure which one he meant. She supposed now she would never know the answer. What song did he have in his head that night – that final time he closed his eyes and never opened them again?

She hoped it was The Sun. Her favorite song from Songs About Jane, the album he’d dedicated to her so many years ago. “The battle’s almost won and we’re only several miles from the sun.” She hoped those were the words he couldn’t get out of his head.

But in her heart of hearts, she wondered if she was only lying to herself.  “It was a hell of a song,” he’d said. “A hell of an album.” Back to Black. That’s what Amy had called it. Fitting enough, with its elegiac melody and that eerily prescient music video – marching off into oblivion in her own funeral procession.

Were those the lyrics haunting him that night? Was that the final song?

We only said goodbye with words.

I died a hundred times.

You went back to her,

And I went back to…

I went back to

Black.

She would never get to ask him. Some truths were unknowable. She could only hope she had given him some comfort that night as she’d reached up with one arm and switched off the light, still holding him and stroking his back with her other one. She had felt his body relax in her arms as he drifted off, slipped away from her into the—into the darkness? Or into the light?

“Good night, my love,” she had whispered, as she held him for the final time. “Sleep well.”

Dear Readers,               

RIP Adam Levine.

Just one chapter left to wrap it all up! I considered ending the story here, but it just seems too dark. (Or do you like it dark? What do you think of this as an ending?)

P.S. If you haven’t seen it already, I have another story idea that I’m thinking of writing next (working title is Fill Me Up). The tone is MUCH lighter, I promise! The prologue is already posted and I’m soliciting feedback to see if I should go ahead with it, so please check it out when you have a moment (and THANK YOU to everyone who has already weighed in). The link for that one is www.wattpad.com/32597164